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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (68438)	9/9/2004 1:44:04 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

Weighty Questions By: JayReding - Redstate John Zogby explains why he thinks that the 11-point gap between Bush and Kerry is a myth. He argues that his sampling of 39% Democrats, 35% Republicans, and 26% Independents is the right sampling. Dick Morris on why Zogby is wrong. .......How big is Bush's lead? Don't believe the surveys that show it in the 5- to 7-point range. Believe the surveys of Time and Newsweek, which show a lead in excess of 10 points. The difference is because pollsters disagree about whether or not to weight their results to keep constant the ratio of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in their sample. Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response. But other polling firms — and I — disagree. We feel that political party is not a demographic, like gender or race or age. If the survey finds more Republicans than usual, we think it's because the country has become more Republican, so we treat the result as a indicator of national mood, not of statistical error. Time and Newsweek both picked up major moves toward the GOP in the wake of the convention. Likely the other firms did too, but they treated the finding as a mistake and weighed down the Republican interviews, making the race appear to be closer than it really is. The debates are likely to help Bush, since Kerry's supporters are so divided on the war and on terrorism. Almost whatever Kerry says is likely to lose him a share of his voters. For example, 37 percent of his supporters told the Rasmussen Poll that they want America to give priority to making democracy work in Iraq, while 54 percent want Kerry to emphasize troop withdrawal. So when Kerry said Monday that he'd prioritize bringing the troops home, his comments appealed to the majority of his voters but alienated more than a third of them. The debates are fraught with such traps.