Poll Fucked

Damn it. Reuters is using that incorrect Newsweek poll and I'm sure others are too, just in time for the Sabbath gasbags to inscribe "baby bounce" in granite:

"A Newsweek poll released on Saturday showed Kerry gained a four-point bounce from last week's Boston convention where he was formally nominated. "


Donkey Rising explains the problem with the poll:

...as their story sheepishly admits, half of their poll was conducted on Thursday night, before Kerry had delivered his acceptance speech! Moreover, their results differ on the two nights, with Kerry leading by 2 points in the pre-acceptance speech data and by 10 points in the post-acceptance speech data.

What possible excuse can there be for presenting these data as measuring Kerry's bounce from the convention, when the effect of the most important event of the convention isn't included in half the data? Perhaps there is one, but I can't think of it.

And that's not all that's wrong with their bounce measure. To make their sin even more egregious, the previous poll they use as a point of comparison is way too long ago (July 8-9) to be a real before/after comparison. What if the race was closer before the convention than it was on July 8-9? Then using July 8-9 as a point of comparison would further contribute to understating Kerry's bounce from the convention.

And in fact that appears to be the case. In the Gallup poll, Kerry was leading 51-44 on July 8-11 but only 49-45 on July 19-21. So using July 8-9 as the comparison period probably knocks several more points off Kerry's bounce.


I'm assuming that the Kerry campaign is blastfaxing the whores like crazy with the problems in this poll. if they're not, they're stupid. Once these things gel in the minds of the kewl kid chatterers it's almost impossible to get them to revise it.