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By Tom Pain
Jan. 28, 2007 I’ve tried to teach readers of this site to disregard any surveys/polls you read. That every one has a political agenda and distorts the numbers to support it is obvious. Unfortunately, some still don’t get it. Today, in our Rebuttals section, one of our erstwhile contributors cited a poll conducted by MSNBC and Newsweek, two bastions of the liberal media, as evidence that his opinions were correct. Let’s look more closely at the poll to determine the real facts. The poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, who spoke with 1,003 Americans above age 18. The first important thing to note – and you’ll have to because neither MSNBC nor Newsweek tell you – is that the poll included many more Democrats than it did Republicans or Independents. Here is but one telling fact that confirms this: To their question, Now thinking ahead to the next presidential election? In general, would you rather see a Republican or a Democrat elected as our next president in 2008,” we see these results:
First, we can determine the number of Independents easily. 3% of the total vote was for the Other Party, and Independents were the only ones who voted for that category. Thus, 3% of 1,003 = 30 people, which equals 8% of Independents, so Independents numbered 375 of the respondents, which leaves 625 people.
Next, we know that 49% of the respondents voted for a Democrat, or 491 people. Since we know that number includes 42% of the 375 Independents, or 158 people, that means Republicans and Democrats were 333 of the number. Doing the same calculation for the 281 people (28% of 1,003) who preferred a Republican shows us that 210 of those people were the Republicans and Democrats.
I’m not a mathematician, so I’m not going to document how I kept playing with different numbers to figure out the correct numbers, and in fact, I never did get it exactly right – I expect that those 0%s in the Other Party category actually had votes. However, using the numbers 255 Republicans, 375 Independents, and 373 Democrats comes out real close.
So, what does this mean? Not much since history tells us that a high voter turnout for a Presidential election would be about 70% of voters, and, in modern elections, Republicans get a higher turnout than do Democrats. Obviously, if respondents were evenly dispersed over all three voter-types, a Democrat would be ahead on the basis of more Independents voting for the Democrat. But the reality is that we should expect more Republicans to turn out, and that turnout factor could easily mean that if an election were held tomorrow, a Republican could win. Throw in the likelihood that Republicans will make gains before election – it would be hard to imagine them getting worse and sooner or later the public is going to emotionally separate their decision from Bush-hatred – and it looks like ’08 is another dead heat to me.
Of course, the liberal media don’t want you to think that though.
As far as the rest of the survey results, particularly those the other U-K contributor alluded to in his Rebuttal post, they are all similarly skewed by the dearth of Republican voters included, so I won’t bother critiquing them. Suffice it to say that if polls were conducted that accurately dispersed respondents according to the historical likelihood that their demographic would actually vote – if you don’t vote, as far as me and the politicians care, you don’t count – this poll would have hugely different results. ------------ About the author Tom Pain: Just an American boy with so much common sense, it hurts. Email: thomas.pain@hughes.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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