Bush is Up 2% (3 way) or 1% (Head to Head) says new TIPP/IBD National Poll

[The Vorlon]

The media frenzy just reflects their enthusiasm for a good story.. the actual shift in the polls has been about 4% or so.  Bush was up 2% or so, he is now down 2% or so.

The fundementals of the race have not changed.

PREDICTION - Bush will be up 2 or 3 in the next round of National polls.

UPDATE!

And now Gallup shows Kerry +6.. open mouth... insert foot....

END UPDATE.....

Just Released TIPP/IBD Poll

3 way Race

Bush 43 / Kerry 41 / Nader 7 (That would be Bush up 2 or 3? )

2 way Race

Bush 45 / Kerry 44

Most, but not all, interviews were conducted before the Death of President Reagan.

UPDATED:

CORRECTION !

I made a mistake when I "eyeballed" one of the internals.  The Dem/Rep/Ind split in this poll is about 35/33/32 which is darn close to dead on. (I should never have doubted these guys!)

Bush up by 4% among independants. (statistically insignifigant given small sample) But if true very good news.  The GOP typically holds it's base a bit better than the Dems do, so Kerry needs to win independants by about 6% to win the election.

Bush job approval is 45.7%

Kerry leads by 1% in "Battlegrounds" (statistically insignifigant given the small sample)

This poll has been added to Dave's polling section.

[The Vorlon]

Nader 7?  With that we can tell that they have a bad likely voter screen.

No.

It means it's a REGISTERED VOTERS poll where a bunch of people who will not actually vote get to have an opinion anyway and randomly pick a name from the list.

This poll switches over to a tracking poll in the fall and converts over to "likely" voters then as well.

This far out using "likely" or "registered" voters is not cut and dried - you can make an argument either way.

[The Vorlon]

When Bush's support below 45, I can't see him winning. Undecided won't break in his favor. I'm not sure who the victor of this poll is really.

The 45% is a bit misleading.  TIPP doesn't push the leaners, which I personally think in a registered voters poll is perfectly valid.

If you push the leaners 5 months out you are getting gibberish.  

Many of these registered voters (about a third) will not actually vote, and if you push them, you get the result of the last news story they saw on TV rather than an actual formed political opinion.

That is why polls like Newsweek and (before they just switched pollsters) Time used to swing hugely from side to side.  If you beat up the leaners till they pick a name, if X had a good news cycle X gets a huge "lead" and next poll if Y had a good cycle, Y surges to huge "lead"

[The Vorlon]

Nader 7?  With that we can tell that they have a bad likely voter screen.

3rd party usually polls high anyway early on.  Check out Fox/OD from 2000 (I'm not a huge fan of Fox/OD, but aside from my opinion, they have a good reputation... that's why I'm referring to them)...

At this time of year in 2000 Fox/OD only had Nader at 3%, but only a few weeks later (by late June... after he declared?) he polled 7%.  He then went up to 8% in July.  And while these were RV polls, the issue doesn't appear to be RV versus LV, just people willing to give the 3rd party a look until they realize their vote is important in the two way race.  Why do I think this?  Well, by late July Fox/OD did a Likely Voter poll and Nader's numbers only dropped to 6%.  Then, by September, October, and November, they ran between 3% and 5%... averaging just under 4%.

Gallup was similar, peaking Nader at 6% in a LV poll in June.  Tarrance/Snell, oddly, had him much lower at the same time... still he peaked in their LV poll at 6% too, by early August.

Point is, 7% for Nader in a RV poll is not out of whack.  Even 7% in a LV poll in June/July/August is only slightly high.  If he's still at 7% come September/October, then it's time to ask some serious questions.

Basically right on.

There is a block of voters called "The Good Citizen" vote, about 8% of the population or so (really hard to nail down the exact number) who just about always vote, but are very weakly associated with any party.

A lot of them just say "Nader" (or "Smith" or "Jones") to park their vote till they actually make up their mind.

Till say October or so a big chunk of Nader is just another name for"Undecided"

[The Vorlon]

Question to Vorlon and all. Would you consider this poll to be better news for Bush or Kerry? The leadership index dropped a lot which is bad for Bush but he actually gained a point or two in the race against Kerry, so it can be argued either way.

If Kerry and Bush were not running against each other, they would both be un-electable.

There is not "good news" for either candidate, we are left trying to figure out which candidate just got a slightly smaller mountain of bad news...

Bush was down 1% head to head, he is now up 1% head to head. I guess it is a tiny bit of good news for Bush.

Kerry cannot seem to get past the low 40s no matter how bad things get for Bush.

It is also a registered voters poll, when you drill down to likely voters, the GOP typically picks up 3% or so.

Bush's base is holding up very well.

The perception of the strength of the economy is just barely beginning to turn positive for Bush and that helps.

Bush is badly wounded, but his base likes him a lot more than Kerry's base likes Kerry.  Kerry's base hates Bush, but are far fromthrilled about Kerry himself.

Bush just had the month from Hell, and he is not down 12% -  I guess that is the "goog" news you can find for him.

If the economy keeps cranking out 947,000 jobs every three months, Bush will win.

Iraq gets blows up again, Kerry likely wins.

This poll?....

Within the margin of error this is good news for Bush... barely...

It would be interesting to poll "None of the Above" as an option.

[The Vorlon]

Vorlon, I finally did get polled today!! Yea for me! It was a Zogby poll here were the questions :

Are you a citizen of the US?

What state are you in?

What is your zip code?

Are you a registered voter?

If the election were held today who would you most likely vote for?

Republican- George W. Bush
Democrat - John F. Kerry
Independent -Ralph Nader

What party do you consider yourself?

Democrat
Republican
Independent
(one or two others I can't remember)
No Affiliation

What's your age?


What religious affiliation are you?
 (It listed several)



What do you think of the questions Vorlon?

Thats it ?? (!)

Did they ask you about your past voting (ie if you voted last race, etc)

Did they ask how interested you were in the race, etc?

I am always interested in the voter sceen he uses.

Did the person who called have a noticeable accent or regional dialect BTW...?

[The Vorlon]

The graph from Polling Report:


I think they overestimated Nader.  No way he gets 8% in the south...the south is the least third-party friendly part of the country.

Remember these regional samples are only a bit over 200 people each - ie +/- 7% or so.

Take all of the regional/subgroup breakouts with about a megaton of salt.

[The Vorlon]

Ok, I'm confused.  Am I reading this right?  The last poll was registered voters and the one released today is Likely voters?

Sorry if I was unclear.

Both this poll, and the last, were registered voter polls.

TIPP converts over to a "likely" format in (I believe) September.

This poll, and their previous poll, were both REGISTERED voters.

[The Vorlon]

No, what threw me was that it is listed in the poll section as "likely voters".  Guess it was just mistakenly posted that way.

Thanks.

That would have been my mistake - I will correct.

[The Vorlon]

Thats it ?? (!)

Did they ask you about your past voting (ie if you voted last race, etc)

Did they ask how interested you were in the race, etc?

I am always interested in the voter sceen he uses.

Did the person who called have a noticeable accent or regional dialect BTW...?

Yep that was it. None of those questions that you said. She sounded like a midwesterner. I had filled out their a form on the Zogby website so I guess that's where they got my number.

It sounds to me like they were just doing a "cleanup" call to verify your information that you gave them for the Zogby online thing.

You were not part of a "poll" per se, but since they have semi-verified that you online information is valid, you opinion will now "count" in the zogby online polls.

Hmmm...

do you think it is just "barely" possible that a Democratic (or a Republican for that matter) candidate could get 200 volunteers to sign up to these Zogby things as one party, get verified, and then suddenly switch their votes to the other party generating a massive desertion in Zogby polls from one candidate to another and thus totally make these online things compleatly useless?

Boy I feel good about these Zogby Internet polls... all warm and fuzzy....

[The Vorlon]

The media frenzy just reflects their enthusiasm for a good story.. the actual shift in the polls has been about 4% or so.  Bush was up 2% or so, he is now down 2% or so.

The fundementals of the race have not changed.

PREDICTION - Bush will be up 2 or 3 in the next round of National polls.

Just Released TIPP/IBD Poll

3 way Race

Bush 43 / Kerry 41 / Nader 7 (That would be Bush up 2 or 3? )

2 way Race

Bush 45 / Kerry 44

Most, but not all, interviews were conducted before the Death of President Reagan.

UPDATED:

CORRECTION !

I made a mistake when I "eyeballed" one of the internals.  The Dem/Rep/Ind split in this poll is about 33/35/32 which is darn close to dead on. (I should never have doubted these guys!)

Bush up by 4% among independants. (statistically insignifigant given small sample) But if true very good news.  The GOP typically holds it's base a bit better than the Dems do, so Kerry needs to win independants by about 6% to win the election.

Bush job approval is 45.7%

Kerry leads by 1% in "Battlegrounds" (statistically insignifigant given the small sample)

This poll has been added to Dave's polling section.

Dems 33 Reps 35???  How is that almost dead on.  Everything I have seen on voter registartion nationwide the Dems have a 3-4% advantage

A very common confusion.

You are mixing up "voter registration" with "party identification"

Some background:

There is no "official" national data on party ID.  It does not exist.  Some states, the largest of which is Texas (16,000,000 voters or so) do not even have people register by party ID. - hence there is no "official" ratio of Democrats to Republicans for national polls.

In addition, much of the data at the state level is "wrong" in the sense that it does not reflect how people think of them selves.

For example, in the South, "officially" the democrats still have a rather large voter registration advantage.  A lot of folks who registered as Democrats in 1976 and voted for Reagan twice, Bushes twice and a Dole in between, are still "officially" Democrats....

To use a famous example, John Kerry's wife was still registered as a Republican untill just last year.

If you do a survey and ask people what party the belong to, the result, especially in the South, often do not match well with the  "official" state data for this reason.

To get around this problem, pollsters ask a softer fuzzier question.

I may have the wording very slightly wrong, but Gallup for example asks:

"Regardless of what party you may be registered to, do you generally think of yourself more as being more of a [rotate] Democrat or more of a [rotate] Republican?"

Based on more than 40,000 interviews Gallup did in the past year, this question essentially produced a tie (I think the GOP "won" by 0.3% if I recall)

PEW, again over more than 20,000 interviews asked a similar question (with "independant as one of the options) and again got, within fractions of a %, a tie result.

When you see a GOP/DEM/IND breakdown in a poll it is NOT how they may in fact be actually registered, but rather what party they self identify with.  These are slightly different things.

Many voters are also a bit confused about this question when polled.  The guy in Alabama who is on the books as a Democrat but has voted GOP for 20 years gets asked what party does he belong to... he could give you either answer...

Because of this, there is a great deal of debate about if you should weight a poll using party ID or not.

Zogby, Battleground, CBS News, and Rasmussen are the only four that do a hard weight by party ID (all using different ratios I might add - which shows how there is no actual agreement on the "correct" ratio) The rest collect the data as a validity check, but do NOT actually adjust their quoted result based upon the party ID breakdown they collect.

It is this difference between actual hard "party registration" and "party identification" that often cause confusiion.

The best "guess" as to actual registration data is that the Dems indeed have about a 4% advantage, but in "party identification" it is essentially even.

Because of confusion in how people answer the question (ie defacto Republicans in the South who are "officially" democrats) most if the time a good survey will show a result about in the middle with the dems having a 2% advantage, or so..

Hope than answers your question

[The Vorlon]

Actually, both these guys are in trouble.  It's the 62 Mets vs. the 62 Mets.

That would be the 62 Mets farm team vs the 62 Mets farm team, but yes, you have the right idea.

In Switzerland one of the options on the ballot is "none of the above"

Smart people those Swiss.

[The Vorlon]

I may have been unclear, There are 2% more Dems than Reps in this sample.

My apologies, I posted the numbers in the wrong order.  My bad

2% more Dems than Reps is "about" right

[The Vorlon]

Aah ok then my mistake

Actually my mistake, I posted the ratio in the wrong order.

Since you have apologized already, you have one free mistake coming, at no additional charge!