Captain Ed's fisking of said CBS poll. Don't you think we should at least ask why they took a poll with 1% more Democrats than Republicans and re-weighted it to 14% more?
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If readers click the link to the actual results, however, they will find that CBS found a much more ambiguous trend than their reporting suggests. In his overall job performance, Bush gained two points over the past month, from 44% to 46%. Americans gave the President a five-point boost in his campaign against terror with 58% now approving of his performance in that area. He also gained four points for his economic stewardship, although that only amounted to an anemic 38%, the same as his approval rating for Iraq, which only declined a single percentage point from last month.
There is plenty of bad news in the CBS poll, especially on Social Security, which has seriously eroded over the past couple of months. However, this poll certainly does not support the unbroken chain of gloom contained in the main CBS report of the survey. And even the true results have to be reviewed in light of the odd weighting given the sample taken by CBS (see page 5):
Total Respondents: 1150
*********************Unweighted*****Weighted
Total Republicans.......390............367
Total Democrats.........394............418
Total Independents......366............365
The new weighted numbers increase Democrats from 34.3% of the sample to 36.3%, while dropping Republicans from 33.9% to 31.9%, creating a gap that went from 0.4% to 4.4% in favor of Democrats. The CBS weighting puts Republicans on the same footing as independents, an unusual and unrealistic model for any polling sample.
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