Wednesday October 06, 2004

Straw Poll

Amazingly, AP is declaring last night’s vice presidential debate a draw, despite the fact that the VP lied about everything from whether he’d ever met Edwards before to his constant insinuations that Saddam and al-Qaida had a colloborative relationship. This graf from the AP story made me do a doubletake.

Both candidates got some encouragement from post-debate polls. Cheney fared best in an ABC News poll of a Republican-leaning group of registered voters who watched the debate, with 43 percent giving Cheney the edge, while 35 percent said Edwards won.

Well, that’s an interesting way to do a poll. There’s registered voters, likely voters and now “Republican-leaning registered voters.” If you look at ABC’s poll, you’ll see that it’s a poll of people who watched the debate. This group was composed of 38 percent Republicans and 31 percent Democrats, with the rest undecided. So while this poll might measure the media footprint of the debate — if more Dems had simply watched, these numbers would have presumably gone the other way — it’s a terrible measure of who made an impression on the people who matter. ABC probably shouldn’t even conduct such a poll — at least not without correcting for the turnout, as it were — and AP sure shouldn’t be citing it as evidence of a “draw.” CBS’s canvas of 178 undecided voters found that Edwards won by a large margin, 41 to 28 percent.