Thursday October 14, 2004

Kerry Wins Among ‘Republican-leaning registered voters.’

After the vice presidential debate, I took issue with the AP’s use of ABC News’ poll of debate viewers to declare the matchup a draw. The problem was that the ABC poll was the only one Cheney won and the sample was 38 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat, something the AP coverage glossed as “a poll of a Republican-leaning group of registered voters.”

Well guess what? The party composition of last night’s audience was exactly the same — 38 to 31 — and Kerry won, 42 to 41. ABC calls this a draw. It will be interesting to see if the AP, which hasn’t filed a story on this yet, again describes the ABC poll as one of “Replubican-leaning registered voters” or instead uses it as evidence of a “draw.” Bloomberg calls the ABC poll a tie in its hed, but reports the party affiliations of the sample.

CBS’s poll shows a Kerry win — 39 percent to 25 percent — while CNN’s shows Kerry winning 52 to 39 percent. Since Kerry also had a slight edge in ABC’s GOP-leaning poll, well, this debate wasn’t even close, no matter how the AP reports it or the GOP spins it.