Is that a shrub in your pocket...
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
More Stupid Poll Tricks
One Zogby poll you won't be seeing is for here in my district - the NY-25th - for the race between Democrat Dan Maffei and nine-term, Bush rubber stamp incumbent, James Walsh, which had to be re-run (as I wrote about before) when Zogby used the wrong district's makeup to weight the poll. This time around, the Walsh campaign appears to have been successful in getting the poll pulled because they disagreed with Zogby's basic methodology (read, Walsh - who is whiny, even for a Republican - is behind). According to one of the poll sponsors, local ABC affiliate WSYR (owned by Clear Channel, which is a contributor to the Walsh campaign):
...we discovered that some of the same people who were called for the first poll, were called again. Zogby confirmed they did indeed use the same larger sample of 5000 likely voters, to come up with this "new" poll sample of 502 likely voters. Our independent expert felt this raised a red flag...an unknown variable. The concern? How would you react if you were called twice in about a week, to answer the same questions? Would you answer differently? The same? Would you even take the call?
[...]
Mr. Zogby firmly stands by his findings. He insists his methodology is sound, and was prepared to join us live at 5:30pm to explain his findings and back-up his results. He points out pollsters often disagree about each other's methods. With respect to Mr. Zogby, we felt the questions raised by the outside reviewers, coupled with the short time we had to make a decision, left us with only one choice: We had to pull the poll.
Yesterday - no doubt fearing the release of the Zogby poll - Walsh - after steadfastly refusing throughout the campaign to release internal polls - posted a message on his website touting an internal poll showing Walsh with a "double-digit" lead in the race, and attacking Zogby as inaccurate, and partisan.
Certainly sounds like things in the 25th are closer than Walsh would like.
