Is that a shrub in your pocket...
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Lies, Damn Lies, and Polls
There was a rather disappointing poll released last night here in the NY-25, with the Bush rubber stamp, Jim Walsh, supposedly 9.5% ahead of Dan Maffei, his Democratic challenger. Shortly after its release, though, there was this:
The Post-Standard/NewsChannel 9 poll, completed by Zogby International of Utica, was released at 5 p.m., but quickly recalled after the pollster discovered an error that tainted the results. Zogby has agreed to do an entirely new poll.
The poll results were given to the Maffei campaign in the afternoon, but only the raw results (Walsh up by 9%). The crosstabs didn’t come through until 4:30, and when they started to look at them, they saw that the registration sample was totally off. Not just a little bit off, but so bad that the poll was worthless
Actual Republican registration in the NY-25th is about 36% and Democratic registration is about 32%, but Zogby weighted the poll at 44% Republican/31% Democrat (which happens to be the distribution in Zogby's home district, the 24th). In other words, they gave Walsh somewhere in the neighborhood of an 9-point bump (maybe more, depending on how you weight Democratic identification vs. registration).
Maffei passed that information along to Channel 9 and to the Post-Standard at about ten minutes to five and told them that the poll was crap. The TV station ran with the story at 5:00 (on their newscast, as well as on their website) anyway (surprisingly - not - they're owned by Clearchannel, which has actually donated money to the Walsh's campaign - how’s that for fair and balanced?), but then retracted the story by 5:30.
Supposedly, John Zogby personally called Channel 9 to apologize, and admitted that the poll is so flawed that they'll have to scrap it entirely, and redo it. In a story in today's Post-Standard, Zogby is quoted as saying:
"The numbers were wrong. We made a mistake, and I feel terrible about it. I am mortified."
