Delete - dupe (original thread on Teixeira linked below)

[swag]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=834767&mesg_id=834767



For example:

http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/

September 17, 2004

CBS News/New York Times Poll Has It Close to Even!

Well, that is if you weight their data to conform to the 4 point Democratic party ID lead which we have good reason to believe is the underlying distribution in the voting electorate. As many have already heard, the new CBS News/New York Times poll, conducted September 12-16, gives Bush an 8 point lead (50-42) among RVs--but also gives the Republicans a 4 point edge on party ID. Reweight their data to conform to an underlying Democratic 4 point edge (using the 39D/35R/26I distribution from the 2000 exit poll) and you get a nearly even race, 47 Bush/46 Kerry.

Nearly even. That goes along with the the 46-46 tie in the Pew Research Center poll (which gave the Democrats a 4 point edge on party ID without weighting) and the 48-48 tie in the Gallup poll (once weighted to reflect an underlying Democratic 4 point edge). Not to mention the two other recent national polls (Harris, Democracy Corps) that show the race within one point.

Perhaps all this is just a coincidence, but the pattern seems striking. Once you adjust for the apparent overrepresentation of Republican identifiers in some samples, the polls all seem to be saying the same thing: the race is a tie or very close to it.

. . .

[Zell in Hell]

1. The right will argue...

That these adujustments distort the true picture and that there are more registered Republicans now than in 2000.

[swag]

2. They are welcome to their mistaken hypotheses.

[Dick_Tuck]

3. Good article

I think that the LV algorithms have a major flaw this cycle. That's with the youth vote. 18-24 year olds are usually apathetic, and vote in much smaller numbers than 55-65 year olds. The Iraq war has this group as energized as they were in 1972. You've also got the Howard Stern schwing voters, who probably don't pass LV muster. And you have the minority voters, who've been hit the hardest by the Bush economy.

OTOH, Bush has alienated "Log Cabin" voters, fiscal conservatives, and isolationist paleoconservatives. People like Tucker Carlson and Andrew Sullivan are speaking against Bush's civil liberties positions. Buchanan and Buckley are speaking out against Bush's foreign policies. Paul O'Neil, and others are speaking out against Bush's fiscal policies.

All these factors make me think that the LV polls could be off as much as 3-5 points. I chalk up the two 13 point polls to just being outliers.