[HPFGU-OTChatter] I voted!!! was Re: Obama and daughter HP fans

[Kai Wen Lee]

Cabal:
Most polls that are within 5 - 6 points are in the margin of error which is why we have certain states that are "battleground" because they are in that margin.

CJ:
There are three or four websites dedicate to poll numbers: RealClearPolitics.com, FiveThirtyEight.com and Pollsters.com are the three I frequent. All of those sites classify as "toss-ups" states where the polling numbers put candidates within five points of each other. Where the candidates are polling between 5 and 10 percent apart, the state is said to be "leaning". States where the polling difference exceeds 10 percent are "solid".

Cabal:
Polls are correct in political races most of the time, if they are conducted in a broad manner. For example, the GOP will tell you their guy, McCain is only 2-5 pts behind Obama nationally, but they are doing the polling and it slants in their favor.

CJ:
Both political parties have their own internal polling organizations, but most pollsters and the media pretty much ignore them.

Major news organizations -- Time, Fox, NYT, CNN, etc. -- conduct polls in conjunction with the major polling organizations. What this means is that the pollsters (e.g., the Zogby side of a Reuters/Zogby poll) generate the raw numbers, generally through phone surveys, then the media "cook" the numbers through manipulation of "weightings". Weightings are a mechanism that decides how much weight to assign a particular demographic in calculating a poll's results. For example, in a given poll ten percent of respondents might be women who self-identify as Republicans. Fox News (to pick a conservative media outlet) might decide that, since Republican women make up seventeen percent of the general population (and they might have pulled that 17 percent figure from, say, the 2004 election), they were therefore under-represented in the poll. To compensate, Fox might assign a greater weight to their answers. Conversely, they might decide blacks were
 over-represented, and drop that demographic's weighting. The end result is that their final numbers might be more favorable to Republicans than, say a NYT-Gallup poll.

But in the end, since any ethical poll publishes both its raw data and it methodologies, there's only so much manipulation one can get away with. Fox News might be able to get away with, say, bumping its Republican women's weighting a couple of points, but not much more without irreversibly damaging its reputation. This is why even liberal vs. conservative polls generally run within a few percentage points of each other. Of the current polls over at RealClearPolitics, for example, Fox News has Obama at +3 (within its MoE), while CBS/NYT has him at +13. The current RCP average is Obama +6.8.

Cabal:
Because they know that year after year, election after election, the average of the polls and the election results are twins.

CJ:
Exactly. Which is why polling averages and tracking polls carry so much more weight than individual polls. While the press loves to report outliers -- "New poll gives Obama 12-point lead!" -- they are in fact statistically insignificant; any reputable pollster realizes this.

--CJ

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