Tag: polls

Anti-Coakley (and anti-Brown) push-polling reported

Friend of Media Nation John Doherty posts this in the comments:

here in Boston suburbs, I just got “push polled” on the election.

Oddly, they identified the candidates by party first “Republican Scott Brown” *, etc. and then asked if I supported either one (no mention of the faux Kennedy libertarian).

When I said Coakley (in fact, I already voted absentee in case of bad weather), they asked if it would change my vote if I knew Coakley supported “tax payer funding of abortions”.

Call came in around 8:40 Sunday night from DC number: 202 461-3440.

Reverse lookup tells me it’s a landline in Westchester, DC and is unpublished.

* odd because GOP label is pretty toxic here.

This is so mind-blowingly stupid that I have agree with John that it’s “odd.” My guess is it’s some right-wing organization working not just independently of Brown, but against his interests. Apparently they haven’t heard that Massachusetts isn’t Alabama.

I tried calling the number and got a busy signal.

Instant update: A poster at Universal Hub says the calls are connected to Americans in Contact PAC, a right-wing group.

Still more: Just saw a link on Twitter about push-polling linking Brown to “hate groups.” This is really getting ugly.

Polling the Senate race

Good luck making sense out of polls about the Massachusetts Senate race.

Following Democratic candidate Martha Coakley’s even-bigger-than-expected victory in the Dec. 8 primary, most political observers had assumed she would cruise in the final. That assumption has been looking questionable since last week, when a Rasmussen poll showed Coakley with just a nine-point margin over her Republican challenger, Scott Brown.

Then, last night, Public Policy Polling released the results of a survey showing Brown actually leading Coakley by a margin of 48 percent to 47 percent. Let the tea party begin!

A few hours later, the Boston Globe published a story about its own poll, in which Coakley is maintaining a comfortable 15-point lead.

So what’s going on here? Who knows?

Frankly, I would start by throwing out the Public Policy Polling survey — it’s a robocall. (“If Scott Brown, press 1. If Martha Coakley, press 2.”) Would you hang on the line? I wouldn’t.

I’ll also point out that the Globe’s poll was conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, a highly respected operation. I’m no polling expert, but I do know that Rasmussen gets mixed reviews.

Also, as best as I can tell from diving into the fine print, it looks like the Globe/UNH poll was the only one of the three in which respondents were specifically asked about the third candidate in the race, libertarian independent Joe Kennedy, who receives a not-insignificant 5 percent. Indeed, given the vagaries of polling, that alone could explain the difference between Rasmussen’s nine-point margin and the Globe’s 15-point spread.

What’s making everyone hypercautious is that we have absolutely no idea who’s going to turn out in the Jan. 19 special election. And what if there’s a blizzard?

My guess, though, is that Coakley’s right where you’d expect her to be with a little more than a week to go.

Double digits

Everyone being polled could be lying. John McCain could pull Osama bin Laden’s head out of a bag and hold it up before the TV cameras the weekend before the election. Sarah Palin could be replaced on the Republican ticket by Warren Buffet, who — along with Colin Powell — will renounce his previous endorsement of Barack Obama. So no predictions from me.

But good Lord. John Zogby, whose methodology may understate support for Barack Obama, now has him leading McCain by 10 points, 52 percent to 42 percent. And Pew has Obama up by 14 points among both registered voters (52 percent to 38 percent) and likely voters (53 percent to 39 percent).

Posts on polls are kind of useless, and I apologize. But the campaign has taken over most of my brain cells. I thought it was interesting that what seemed like a slight shift toward McCain a few days ago appears to have been stopped and is now being reversed.

I still think it’s going to be close.

Dial “Z” for poll numbers

I’m allergic to math, but even I can understand why Barack Obama’s eight-point lead in the Zogby tracking poll is bigger than it looks.

Zogby has consistently had John McCain doing better than in many other polls. As Nate Silver explains, it’s because Zogby weights party affiliation based on exit polls from the previous election.

So if the electorate is more Democratic today than it was in 2004 — and it is, by quite a bit — then Obama’s lead is actually understated by Zogby. That is, if the tracking poll is accurate in the first place, which is always a question worth asking.

Moving on up

Tracking polls are notoriously unreliable, but the Gallup trend is clear:

  • Aug. 23-25: McCain, 46 percent; Obama, 44 percent. Gallup’s take: “It’s official: Barack Obama has received no bounce in voter support out of his selection of Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate.”
  • Aug. 24-26: Obama, 45 percent; McCain, 44 percent. Gallup’s take: “No major change in structure of race, though Obama is doing slightly better.”
  • Aug. 25-27: Obama, 48 percent; McCain, 42 percent. Gallup’s take: “Democratic candidate gains in Monday through Wednesday interviewing.”

If these numbers are right, then it shows that all the media’s hyperventilating about the convention’s not being attack-oriented enough and the Clintons’ stealing the spotlight from Obama is bunk.

The latest figures don’t even capture voter reaction to Bill Clinton’s, John Kerry’s, and Joe Biden’s speeches, not to mention Obama’s cameo at the end of the night. And Gallup’s numbers won’t include Obama’s own speech until Saturday.

What does this mean? It looks like Obama is going to receive a normal convention bounce. And unless McCain and the Republicans utterly blow it next week, we’ll be back to a tied race when both conventions are over.

We’d all be better off watching C-SPAN.