How Reliable Are The Latest Swing State Polls?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Democrats, McCain, Polls, Republicans, VideoCharlie Cook weighs in, and he’s not impressed.
Now hold on…out of 100, he’d disregard between 90 to 95 of them?
Listen, I get why he thinks that these state polls aren’t as accurate, but to dismiss polling institutions like SurveyUSA, Quinnipiac and Public Policy Polling as crappy local polling companies just trying to get some attention, dismisses a lot of hard work.
Maybe Cook will revisit his opinions post election?
This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Democrats, McCain, Polls, Republicans, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 28th, 2008 at 12:17 am
The MSM wants this race to be close and Obama having a large lead is not good for them, they want it to be like a te all the way to november
June 28th, 2008 at 8:19 am
to dismiss polling institutions like SurveyUSA, Quinnipiac and Public Policy Polling as crappy local polling companies just trying to get some attention, dismisses a lot of hard work.
It isn’t how hard you work, it’s the quality of the work you produce. The larger national firms go to great lengths to (attempt to) get representative sampling and in-depth response. State-level polling generally doesn’t, and is subject to MUCH greater sampling errors and related design flaws.
And yes, Quinnipiac is a good example, despite their reputation. QPI is an academic polling service that is part of a mid-sized private university and uses student interveiwers. Their public releases almost never include the cross-tab data required to check for validity. “Trust us.” Heh.
June 28th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Oh, and Public Policy Polling is a partisan-oriented firm (D) that uses a completely automated methodology, which makes their results somewhat questionable as to reliability, especially during primaries. Not because they’re necessarily attempting to slant their polls, mind you, but because their focus is often on looking for “spin factors” for primary candidates to utilize.