Polling

As Gallup polling organization says, race is a natural question to ponder with this election since Obama is the first black man to gain the nomination of a major party. But, instead of finding race to be a major factor among whites, the polling from Gallup has found that considerations about race is basically a wash making the issue practically meaningless as a factor in possible vote outcomes…

If Old Media can cook their numbers to make their favored candidate look good, they will. Earlier today, I covered two cooked AP-GfK polls (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). The pollster dramatically changed the party-ID makeup of the second poll to include a much higher percentage of Democrats, and watered down the strong-GOP component of the Republicans sampled. As a result, the two poll results,…

In the kitchens of the Associated Press, it's almost as if the wire service asked its chief cook -- er, pollster -- GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media, to do the following: Whip up a tasty, representative poll after the Republican Convention.Three weeks later, make the same dish, but this time adjust the mix of ingredients by radically oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans, thereby…

With all the mainstream media emphasis on poll numbers that supposedly show strong leads for Barack Obama I was wondering if there should be any analysis of an AOL straw poll that shows John McCain solidly beating Barack Obama in a random sample of hundreds of thousands of readers. A major difference between the AOL straw poll and that of other polls is that the AOL poll does not consist of…

On September 20, Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters posted on a misleading Associated Press/Yahoo poll on racism. The poll asserted that if Barack Obama loses, it will be because of "[d]eep-seated racial misgivings" held by "one-third of white Democrats." Later that day, NB's Michael Bates criticized the AP's report on the poll for its historically inaccurate claim that the US "enshrined slavery into…

On Monday's CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez interviewed BET Tonight host Ed Gordon about a recently released Associated Press-Yahoo! poll which found that forty percent of white Americans and one-third of Democrats and Independents harbor negative feelings about African Americans. The segment did not include any critique of the poll or the suggestion that such a large amount of people…

UPDATE at end of post: Polling agency VIPs have contributed to Democrats including Obama.Are you getting tired of the mainstream media meme that if you're white and you don't vote for Barack Obama it's because you're a racist? Or that if John McCain wins, it's because he's white and Obama isn't?Well, on Saturday, the Associated Press and Yahoo News released results of a new poll, and the major…

On August 31 at Newsbusters, Warner Todd Huston caught NBC political correspondent Andrea Mitchell's assessment about the kind of women who would be supporting the McCain-Palin ticket: ..... they (McCain-Palin) think that they can peel off some of these working class women, not college educated, who, the blue collar women who were voting for Hillary Clinton and may be more conservative on social…

A consistent media meme for all of 2008 was that this was the year of the Democrats inasmuch as party identification in poll after poll had shown greater percentages of folks leaning left than right.Not so fast! The success of the recently-concluded Republican National Convention has so changed this calculus that a new Gallup poll revealed folks leaning towards Republicans and Democrats is now…

UPDATE at end of post: McCain leads by ten amongst likely voters.New polling numbers just released by Gallup show John McCain and Sarah Palin getting a huge bump in support following the Republican National Convention.As media outlets seemed fascinated with Gallup's September 2 survey finding Barack Obama taking an eight point lead after his Party's convention in Denver -- a LexisNexis search…

Move over, Rasmussen, and let Howard take over!It's been a wild week, so how about a little comic relief?  Turns out Howard Dean does his own personal polling—among his wife's employees.  And, surprise!  They tend to agree with him. The DNC Chairman was chatting with Tom Brokaw on MSNBC this afternoon.TOM BROKAW: What did you think of Sarah Palin last night?HOWARD DEAN: I think the first half was…

Wild swings in polling results have been an ongoing big story this election cycle. The LAT, as Dave Pierre pointed out a week ago, experienced a huge shift in their polling away from their man, Barack Obama, and were left scrambling to come up with a solution. But the LAT is not alone. Last month, P.J. Gladnick highlighted a similarly drastic shift in the Newsweek poll.What, then, are we to…

While Obama-loving media members gushed over the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee's choice as a running mate this weekend, the American public were clearly not as enthralled.In fact, not only didn't this announcement give the junior senator from Illinois a bump in the polls, but according to a just-released Gallup survey, he's gone backward: "This is the first time since Obama clinched…

Just in time for the Democratic Convention in Denver this week, is the national press doing their best once again to tilt the playing field in favor of Senator Barack Obama? It would seem that that is indeed the case. Case in point is an article in the USAToday online edition headlined Poll: More than half of Clinton backers still not sold on Obama. However, once the story passes its main focus…