<font color=blue>From Real Clear Politics.......</font>
<font color=gray>
Saturday, April 10 2004
OVERDOSE OF POLLS: Polls, polls, polls, there are polls everywhere these days. In the last few days FOX, Gallup, ARG, AP/Ipsos all released new polling on the presidential race, and then of course Rasmussen is releasing a new tracking poll every day. Then within these polls there are results with registered voters, results with likely voters, results with Nader and results without Nader.
So just in the new Gallup Poll alone, there are four different Bush vs. Kerry numbers:
Bush 46% - Kerry 48% (registered voters without Nader)
Bush 48% - Kerry 45% (likely voters without Nader),
Bush 46% - Kerry 45% (registered voters with Nader),
Bush 47% - Kerry 43% (likely voters with Nader).
As a general rule likely voter results are always a better poll number than registered voters. RCP will always post likely voter results over registered voters. Going forward we will identify, whenever possible, whether the poll is of likely voters or registered voters. Whether it is better to use the numbers with Nader or without Nader is open to debate.
At this stage, Nader is not likely to be as large an influence as he was in 2000, but that doesn't mean he won't end up making a difference. And if he isn't going to be as large a factor, that will begin to show up in his polling numbers as we get closer to election day. If Nader is still polling 3, 4, or 5 percent on the weekend before the election, he will very much be a factor and it would be foolish to ignore his impact. Just ask Al Gore.
So when a poll like Gallup releases its results with four different numbers for the same race, we will quote the likely voter results with Nader, as the main number. However, it would be a mistake to get too hyped up by the inevitable back and forth that will transpire in these polls between now and Labor Day. Leaving aside the period around Kerry's VP selection and the Democratic convention, if one candidate is able to sustain a 5 plus point lead in our Bush vs. Kerry RCP Average (for more than a week) that would signal a more significant shift in the race, otherwise all these different polls are just background noise.
If you had to look at one poll, the number I would focus on is our RCP Average of President Bush's job approval. As a crude measuring stick for the state of the presidential race, an over 50% job approval for the President should translate into a Bush victory. A 45% - 49% job approval will mean a close race, but I would give President Bush the advantage. A 40% - 44% job approval for the President would translate into a dead heat race, and below 40% and you would have to give the advantage to Kerry.
Right now Bush's RCP Average job approval is at 49.6% and I would rate that as bad news for the Kerry campaign. If Bush's job approval stays here or is higher on election day, Kerry will lose. Bush on the other hand could still win with a job approval in the high 30's, though he would be the underdog. Below 30% and the President is finished.
So between now and Labor Day I would pay less attention to the noise in the myriad of different Bush - Kerry numbers and instead focus more on the RCP Average of Bush's job approval to get a better feel for how the election will ultimately turn out. J. McIntyre 11:53am | Link | Email | Send to a Friend
realclearpolitics.com;
<font color=blue>
With 8 months still to go before the November Presidential elections it has already become clear that many in the media have unhinged themselves from any pretense to impartiality, objectivity or even polite split-the-fetus evenhandedness. Expect the polls and surveys to become even more politicized -- perhaps to unprecedented levels -- as we near the elections. In particular, look for more sleight-of-hand use of questionable techniques like quota sampling in those surveys.
Obviously, the key to any poll or survey is the quality of the sampling method used so here is a brief overview of the various sampling techniques used.
</font>
<font color=gray>
PROBABILITY vs NONPROBABILITY SAMPLING
The difference between nonprobability and probability sampling is that nonprobability sampling does not involve random selection and probability sampling does. Does that mean that nonprobability samples aren't representative of the population? Not necessarily. But it does mean that nonprobability samples cannot depend upon the rationale of probability theory. At least with a probabilistic sample, we know the odds or probability that we have represented the population well. We are able to estimate confidence intervals for the statistic. With nonprobability samples, we may or may not represent the population well, and it will often be hard for us to know how well we've done so. In general, researchers prefer probabilistic or random sampling methods over nonprobabilistic ones, and consider them to be more accurate and rigorous. However, in applied social research there may be circumstances where it is not feasible, practical or theoretically sensible to do random sampling. Here, we consider a wide range of nonprobabilistic alternatives.......
Quota Sampling
........In quota sampling, you select people nonrandomly according to some fixed quota. There are two types of quota sampling: proportional and non proportional. In proportional quota sampling you want to represent the major characteristics of the population by sampling a proportional amount of each. For instance, if you know the population has 40% women and 60% men, and that you want a total sample size of 100, you will continue sampling until you get those percentages and then you will stop. So, if you've already got the 40 women for your sample, but not the sixty men, you will continue to sample men but even if legitimate women respondents come along, you will not sample them because you have already "met your quota." The problem here (as in much purposive sampling) is that you have to decide the specific characteristics on which you will base the quota. Will it be by gender, age, education race, religion, etc.?
Nonproportional quota sampling is a bit less restrictive. In this method, you specify the minimum number of sampled units you want in each category. here, you're not concerned with having numbers that match the proportions in the population. Instead, you simply want to have enough to assure that you will be able to talk about even small groups in the population. This method is the nonprobabilistic analogue of stratified random sampling in that it is typically used to assure that smaller groups are adequately represented in your sample.
trochim.human.cornell.edu
</font>
<font color=blue>
The most notorious survey in history is, of course, the deeply flawed Kinsey Report on American Sexuality which came out in 1948 and which even today still accounts for much of the conventional wisdom that compels the hapless global left to keep on rushing headlong towards the precipice of the most disquieting of spiritual Darwinism. If you thought that Hitler, Lenin and Stalin already did enough damage with natural selection, wait till you figure out how even more damaging genetic drift -- the fallback theory that the militant evolutionalists use to fill in the gaps of Darwin's theory of evolution -- is going to be as it makes its way to the temporal sciences and the spiritual realm.
</font>
<font color=gray>
The Kinsey Report: Modeling a Frankenstein Man
Copyright © P. Meehan March, 2002.
All rights reserved.
The report of the nine year study in sexology that treated of the white American male's sexual behavior, mass marketed in 1948 by adroit press agentry under the rubric, The Kinsey Report, was arguably, in its ultimate effects, the most significant of all the instruments of reform deriving from beliefs of the Progressive Era, an epoch of reformist clamorings, the echos of which continued to sound long after those clamorings were themselves stilled in the catastrophe of the First World War and the consequent collapse of order in czarist Russia and in her imperial dominions. They sounded well into the middle years of the twentieth century, fixating the principal investigator of this sexological study and primary author of its associated report, Dr Alfred C. Kinsey, a professor of zoology at Indiana University seized by a vision of a sexual utopia having at its center the celebration of the homoerotic, and with its prophet, Kinsey himself, acclaimed a scientist ranking with Darwin, to whose wraith, it is to be suspected, he prayed at least thrice daily.2 The disclosure that Kinsey was a homosexual can scarcely be a surprising one, given the nature of his utopian vision. But he was, as well, a voyeur, an exhibitionist, and a sadomasochist, descending at times in his masochistic moods into outright lunacy, thrusting the bristled end of a toothbrush deep into his urethra and pulling with force on a rope tied around his scrotum; on at least one occasion he noosed his scrotum in this way, looped the free end of the rope across an overhead pipe and wrapped it around one of his hands, and then, gripping the rope tightly, stepped off a chair, suspending himself in midair for a period that seems to have gone unrecorded, and which, incredibly, left him in one piece, albeit hospitalized......
literatus.net
<font color=blue>
Again note how the stragglers of the sexual revolution -- fashionable gargoyles, really -- serve as never-ending trick mirrors that provide the most disorienting and insidous social cues for the clergy who are really the key to any wholesale strategy involving the ruination of souls. |
