Posted by
The Valletta Papers on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 10:45:29 PM
The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll came out over the weekend indicating that “U.S. voters are closely divided in their 2008 presidential preferences, with 47% favoring Barack Obama and 44% backing John McCain.” How does this Daily Tracking Poll square with the numbers reported earlier by the Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll showing a McCain–Obama tie at 48%?
Take a close look at the internal numbers. Rush Limbaugh spent time today reviewing the D.J. Drummond’s article on WhizBang.com, “How Liberal Trolls Are Working to Get McCain Elected President.” This is a great article, and should be read in full. A more succinct article, “Gallup’s Internals and Our Nations” by Richard Miniter actually summarizes the extensive Drummond piece. Rush relies heavily on Miniter for his report. For now, we will suffice with Rush Limbaugh’s report of the findings:
If you look at the raw numbers, McCain is significantly ahead of Obama, and his support is steady or growing in all categories. Meanwhile, Obama is steady or falling in all categories. Yet, the most recent Gallup reported Obama up over McCain by two points. Why? The weighting of voters. Now, listen to how this is done. "Basically, a guesstimate about voter turnout has changed over at Gallup. They favored Republicans during their convention but now favoring the Democrats. All polling organizations weight the numbers. The question is, how?" Here's how weighting works, by the way. I'll give you radio examples.
Back in the old days -- it's not done this way anymore, but back in the old days -- minority and foreign language radio stations... Let's take Kansas City, for example. I worked there for ten years. And there were two or three black music radio stations. They were always given more weight in terms of percentage of population in the market than actually was. They weighted it for a host of political and business reasons. But weighting basically means guessing, and you are assuming. For example, after the Republican convention, they assume that more Republicans are energized to turn out so they put that in their polling data. That has now subsided and for some reason, Gallup has decided to weight Democrats with more turnout. The question is how this is all done. Now, if that's fascinating to you, it gets even more fascinating at this point.
When the numbers were reweighted to match the ratios established by exit polls over the past few presidential elections the results varied significantly from those reported by Gallup. The result for the same poll is McCain leads with 45% to Obama’s 39%.
Limbaugh paraphrased Richard Miniter: “Could they be right? If voter turnout doesn't change substantially, yeah, it could be right.”