Saturday, July 29, 2006

Poll Questions Persist

KTHV released a spate of polls this week, all of them showing the Democrats up. The one race that has been polled by other organizations showed that race closer than the KTHV poll. There have been persistent questions about the sampling methods used on the poll.

It is well known that they did all the polls over the same time and then released them over the course of the week. The statewide polls sampled 509 likely voters. The second district poll sampled 473 voters. Our question is, were second district voters the majority of voters polled in the statewide races? The poll data is divided several ways when you go look at their so-called "complete results", but it never divides the voters by congressional district. Even the "geocode" section only lists them by rural, urban, or suburan.

It looks to me like this poll was done in a way that vastly overweights the 2nd district where liberals like Bebee and Halter are strong and underweights the 3rd district where Hutchinson, Holt and DeLay should be strong. The second district could be as much as 473/509 parts of this poll when they should be no more than 128/509 parts of this poll.

Does anyone know the facts on how this poll was conducted? KTHV, hello?

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This exact thing was pointed out to you in the primary, and your response was that the KTHV poll had always been correct. And in the primary, they were right, which leads me to believe that now they are also right.

2:14 PM, July 29, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

They oversampled the 3rd in the primary , thus there results were right because most republican primary voters live in the 3rd

5:25 PM, July 29, 2006  
Blogger Mark Moore (Moderator) said...

Not so. In the primary they divided it into "Greater Little Rock Area" and "Other". The other was going to be dominated by the 3rd in a GOP Primary. In the Primary I noted that Holt was winning both inside and outside Little Rock, so it did not really matter whether they over or undersampled the 3rd. That is just the way it turned out.

This is different. The 3rd is going to look a lot different from the rest of the state in the General, even though it may not look that much different fromt he rest of the state in a Republican primary.

6:53 PM, July 29, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It always looks diffrent its the Promised land knowen as the 3rd

7:09 PM, July 29, 2006  

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