Kerry up 5 in new CBS/NYTimes poll

[The Vorlon]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/02/opinion/polls/main609944.shtml


In what must be the most inherently self contradictory poll I have seen in a while...

Nationally, Kerry is up 5 points, but in the 18 Battleground states Bush is up 2 points...

Delaware is a battleground state.. Even though Gore won by 13+% in 2000...?
Did something really big happen in Delaware that I missed...? (Perhaps a merger with Utah?)

For those of you have mastered math up to say, the grade 3 level, I will leave the anaylsis of this one up to you...

The "battleground states" that Bush leads by 2 points in  include Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin..

These states make up almost exactly 40% of the nation's vote total, so in the other 60% of the nation Kerry must be up by just a hair under 10 points...

This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 1,024 adults, interviewed by telephone March 30-April 1,2004. The sample included 834 registered voters. The error due to sampling could be plus or minus three percentage points for results based on the samples of registered voters and all adults. Results which may have been valid were surgically altered to resemble Saddam Huissen.  The use of Tarot cards was employed to weight data that had been deemed unreliable by the use of dice and a roulette wheel.  Next, as an additional confirmation, a double check was performed against "Big Fred's" famous 100% all beef foot long hotdog poll.  Lastly, a random number generator, hooked to a rube/goldberg device was used to normalize all data.

[The Vorlon]

How good is the CBS/NYT poll usually?

As I have previously posted, in 2000 they were almost dead on.

Their final call was Gore +1, which was very close to the actual of Gore +0.51.

If you look at the NYTimes/CBS in the elections 1980-1996 they were an utter total complete disaster (The were NEVER even within TWICE the margin of error of their poll - they AVERAGED a miss of 8+ percentage points)

Did they actually fix what was a clearly and fatally flawed poll to get it to work in 2000?,...

....or was 2000 simply a case of "even a broken clock being right twice a day...?"

We will see.

[The Vorlon]

I'm extremely keptical of the Battlegrounds states results.  There isn't any definite impact since Nevada could be 70-30 with the rest of the states being for Kerry, or a third of the Battleground people polled could have come from Iowa, or both.  Is there even a margin of error for the battleground ones?

Assuming that they got 40% of their 834 registered voters from the battleground states (which make up 40% of the population)
that would imply a Battleground sample size of 333 people, or so...
which would imply a margin or error of +/- 5.4%

Course that also assumes that CBS actually knows what thery are doing....

This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 1,024 adults, interviewed by telephone March 30-April 1,2004. The sample included 834 registered voters. The error due to sampling could be plus or minus three percentage points for results based on the samples of registered voters and all adults.Results which may have been valid were surgically altered to resemble Saddam Huissen.  The use of Tarot cards was employed to weight data that had been deemed unreliable by the use of dice and a roulette wheel.  Next, as an additional confirmation, a double check was performed against "Big Fred's" famous 100% all beef foot long hotdog poll.  Lastly, a random number generator, hooked to a rube/goldberg device was used to normalize all data

[The Vorlon]

How good is the CBS/NYT poll usually?

This message brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department...  

CBSNews/NYTimes

2000 = dead on.
1980-1996 = utter disaster.

Did they "fix it" in 2000, or did they just get lucky...?

Not!  They have a history of being 8 points off the final result.

except in 2000... but then again CBS/NYT can't be the most impartial source?.... then again Fox polls are usally quite good...

I think that they just copied of of other polls to be honest and as for what Ben said, FOX/Oppinion Dynamics polls are usually quite accurate.

I think the reason the FoxNews polling is actually prettty darn good, while CBS/NYTimes is, historically, an utter distaster has more to do with knowledge than with idealogy.

Jason Blair not withstanding, I find it hard to believe CBS/NYTimes deliberately crank out biased polls...

Roger Alies, (sp?) the President of FoxNews was a true blue, died in the wool GOP consultant/partisan for decades before he started up with FoxNews. - He actually knows what a decent poll looks like, how it should be run, how to do things...  I suspect similar knowledge is just missing at CBS/NYTimes.

Hey.. these folks think Delaware a swing state... I think that says it all...
I think the issue is competence, not idealogy...

[The Vorlon]

Here is a good way to interpret polls: take the last 6 polls, throw out the one with the highest for Bush and the one with the highest for Kerry and average the remaining 4.

And if the result of any one poll looks totally crazy... throw it out...

It's not like we have a shortage of polls