The Discepancy In The Polls

Most of the discrepancies in the polls are due to the weighting of party identifications of the respondents; polls that show Obama doing (really) well tend to have significantly more Democratic respondents than Republican respondents and polls that show Obama doing ( o k) but not as well tend to have a more equal percentage of Democratic and Republican respondents...

It all comes down to what the electorate will look like on November 4th, November 5th for Republicans :P... If there are a lot more Democrats Obama's win will be larger... I think different polls have the Democrat's partisan advantage anywhere from four to nine points...

that they will, indeed turn out at that rate.

But that's the past. This time around they are unenthusiastic and unhappy with their candidate. We are FIRED UP!

I think our numbers will be higher - but remember this ONLY 17% of those under 30 eligible to vote, voted in 2004. Imagine what would have happened had just two percent more turned out.

What do you think?

We cannot underestimate them. But, we do have reason to be positive.

The key is this...EVERYBODY that can take off election day or even a few hours or even just their lunch hour. DO SOMETHING...anything you can to GET OUT THE VOTE FOR OBAMA. Go to your local office and make phone calls, drive people to polls...anything they need. If you have no local office, go to the busiest polling place. AS LONG AS YOU ARE 40 FEET FROM THE DOOR OF THE POLLING PLACE...you can pass out information (print up stuff to take) you can have signs, you can at least greet voters with a smile and ask them to vote for Obama. These things have proven to be effective.

Studies have been done on this. The single most effective thing that will influence a vote is person to person contact.

Let's each of us make it our goal to not just cast our vote for Obama, but to see how many others we can encourage to do the same.

It's more pronounced in mid term elections...


The partisan advantage is anywhere from four to nine... Is six and one half really unreasonable?


If all polls had a 6.5% Democratic partisan advantage Obama's lead would be six to eight points whic is the RCP avergage:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/general_election_mccain_vs_obama-225.html

...be unrealistically low than high. Having poll numbers too high makes people lax. We don't need that.

They weight them based on actual numbers of registrated voters. Right now, there are approx. 11 million more democrats.

In the past, it has been the republicans who had better turnout. Republicans are sheep and democrats are cats who are often unenthusiastic about our candidate. Face it, many voted for Gore and Kerry holding their nose or stayed home or voted Nader! But, in the recent primaries it was democrats who had the big turnout and made Obama the nominee.

IT'S NOW UP TO US TO MAKE SURE THAT OBAMA WINS!

The only people who will hold their nose while voting for Obama will be former republicans who have come to realize that like it or not, Obama is the better candidate and has a better plan for helping their families.

And some arbitrarily weigh them on how many Dems, Reps, and Indys (they) think will vote on 11/4...


Any pollster worth his salt is using random dialing and not registration rolls...

remember the reports of Republicans registering as Democrats in the primaries, under Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos directive? I wonder how many people did that (which is illegal in Ohio), and how that could affect weighing, since the Dem numbers may be inflated a bit.

Then again, I know a lot of Republicans who are sick of the GOP and are voting Democratic or third party, so I guess you never know.

What matters is what they tell the pollsters...If they are lying to the pollsters that's a different story...

I just meant that since Democratic registrations were up this year, and since some percentage of them are dittoheads who apparently hate democracy, would the weighing of the polls be affected by this? In other words, are the Democratic numbers artificially inflated by a few percent, which could skew the polls, right?

The pollster tries to get a truly random sample...Once he gets a truly random sample he then "knows" how many Democrats, Independents, and Republicans will be voting...But some pollsters arbitraily fix the numbers....

Zogby, Kos(Research200) and Rasmussen arbitrarily fix the numbers...Gallup just goes with the numbers they get... There is an ongoing argument on which method is better...It depends how fluid you think party identification is...

Posters like Mookie, OnTheOtherHand, tritsforme, and Awsi Dooger could probably expalin it better...