Clinton Trails Top 5 Gop contenders in new Zogby Poll

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton trails five top Republican presidential contenders in general election match-ups, a drop in support from this summer, according to a poll released on Monday.

Clinton's top Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and John Edwards, still lead Republicans in hypothetical match-ups ahead of the November 4, 2008, presidential election, the survey by Zogby Interactive showed.

Clinton, a New York senator who has been at the top of the Democratic pack in national polls in the 2008 race, trails Republican candidates Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain and Mike Huckabee by three to five percentage points in the direct matches.

In July, Clinton narrowly led McCain, an Arizona senator, and held a five-point lead over former New York Mayor Giuliani, a six-point lead over former Tennessee Sen. Thompson and a 10-point lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Romney.

She was not matched against the fast-rising Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, in the July poll.

The results come as other national polls show the race for the Democratic nomination tightening five weeks before the first contest in Iowa, which kicks off the state-by-state nomination battles in each party.

Some Democrats have expressed concerns about the former first lady's electability in a race against Republicans. The survey showed Clinton not performing as well as Obama and Edwards among independents and younger voters, pollster John Zogby said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN2645320920071126

Or just crib the other three threads on the front page...

It's a normal, scientific poll whose method of transmission happens to be the Internet (specifically, the Web).

to a normal sample group. Seems much easier to skew it.

“The Zogby stuff, on scientific grounds, is quite questionable,” says Zukin. “Online, Internet, opt-in polling, where people volunteer to be respondents, doesn’t really have a basis in scientific validity. There are two kinds of samples in the world. There are probability samples, and there are non-probability samples.”


The Zogby interactive polls, says Zukin, clearly fall into the latter camp. “With probability samples, when everybody has a known chance of being selected, you can make pretty valid inferences about the population from which it is drawn,” says Zukin. “You can’t do that at all with self-selected surveys. That’s a problem.”


“The poll’s Web site describes the process as ‘interactive’ — that is, it’s an Internet poll, based on a database of individuals who have signed up to participate,” writes Burka. “It is not a random sample; the polling organization solicits responses by e-mail

http://www.cjr.org/politics/how_reliable_is_the_zogbyjourn.php

By phone, generally. So what?

There are probability samples, and there are non-probability samples.

My last class on this was Probability and Stochastic Processes (specifically not probability and statistics) so I have an engineering view of this, namely, that polls in general are not very accurate because their sampling and weighting is based on the very demographic assumptions that the poll itself should inform.

That said, Burka doesn't do anything to establish that using email as a solicitation method biases a sample as opposed to using the telephone.

http://www.surveyusa.com/Scorecards/SUSA2006ElectionReportCard.htm


http://www.surveyusa.com/Scorecards/Scorecard2004AllGeneralX.html


The solicitations are sent to people who already registered...It's self selected respondents......It's a non probability sample... In a true probability sample poll everybody in the universe being sampled has an equal chance of being polled....

In a true probability sample poll everybody in the universe being sampled has an equal chance of being polled....

Which we don't have for phone-based polls either. Specifically, only people who self-select by not refusing to answer a poll are chosen. How is this different from the selection process for Zogby? If you can demonstrate that the Zogby method is less reliable, go for it.

Either a poll is a probability sample or it isn't... It's like being pregnant....

In the Zogby interactive poll I have no chance of being polled unless I register... In a conventional probability sample poll I have a chance of being polled, albeit a rather small one...

Do you agree or disagree and if you disagree, why?

In the Zogby interactive poll I have no chance of being polled unless I register... In a conventional probability sample poll I have a chance of being polled, albeit a rather small one...

Do you agree or disagree and if you disagree, why?

In a conventional sample poll I have no chance of being polled because I don't have a phone. I do have a chance of getting a Zogby email, however. In either case I must choose to answer the survey or not. I really don't see that much of a distinction, except that I may possibly be polled by Zogby, and can't ever be polled by Gallup.

If you're sticking with the strict mathematical definition of a probability sample, which you are correct is like being pregnant, then no poll ever taken in history has used a probability sample.

I know Republicans who vote for HRC in every telephone poll they receive.

Are they supporting her? Hell no! They just want her to be our nominee.

It's like Mary Matalin on MTP this weekend. When Russert told her that Hillary was starting to slide in the polls, she (Matalin) looked freaked out and insisted that she'll still win.

Hell or high water, they want to make sure HRC is our candidate.

His polls are serious.

I appreciate the link and the body of the article. Very informative.

Ignore the whining.... it's funny how Hillaryworlders don't criticize multiple poll announcements when THEY do it.


:nopity:

The poll of 9,355 people had a margin of error of plus or minus one percentage point. The interactive poll surveys individuals who have registered to take part in online polls.

They get "DUed" or "Freeped" all the time.

This is a controlled-participant poll that just happened to use email and the web rather than phone calls as the primary solicitation medium.

but i did just hear tweety say it.

and i am not a fan of tweety...quite the contrary..i can't stand him...i am waiting for KO to come on.

But i did hear tweety talk about the poll..that Hillary gets beat by all the repigs..practically..i was surprised even by Thompson!

i was just listening..not watching and not listening carefully..but that perked my ears to listen..

fly

over 50 of my friends across this nation that belong to the Zogby International in which this poll came from. To our amazement of the 50 I sent and received emails from only 5 reported they had received the zogby polling in their email. I find that rather strange, but I do have a conclusion. In prior polling they ask are you a Democrat? Then they ask are you a strong Democrat? I am under the conclusion they ran this poll with it front loaded with republicans and right leaning independents, and thus you have a bogus poll.

Now I do know there was a Gallup poll out that showed HRC winning over all the republicans and that Obama was tied with Rudy.. I understand how the game is played and I would not be to hyper on this Zogby poll....

But the media will use this poll just like they did the abc poll and repeat it over and over again and disregard all other polling showing hRC in the lead from 2 to 10 points.

I like the game of politics but I do not like to play when the deck is already stacked against your candidate.

Ben David

Is this poll problematic because anybody who wants to can take it, or because they stacked the deck with ringers?

My understanding of these interactive polls is that, just like any other scientific poll, Zogby picks a group of people that they think will model the appropriate electorate. Any given Zogby participant is highly unlikely to actually be counted in any given poll, for that reason.