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August 06, 2004
Georgia Poll
So Strategic Visions, a Georgia based Republican polling firm, polled Georgia voters after the convention and found Bush leading 53-42. But Emil Runge, the Democratic Party of Georgia's PR guy who has considerable polling experience with a national public opinion research firm noticed that the polling firm underweighted the black percentage of the electorate. Strategic Visions had the percentage at 18% of the electorate, even though in the past 3 election cycles the percentage has always been between 22-24%. That's a significant underweight.
So, let's take a look at the original weighting and what the poll results might have been:
| Race | Bush | Kerry | Other/Und. |
| White/Other | 63 | 33 | 4 |
| Afr Amer | 8 | 85 | 7 |
| Total | 53.1 | 42.4 | 4.5 |
Of course, the Bush/Kerry numbers among whites are what I would consider a good guess, based on my guess of what the Bush/Kerry numbers are among black voters. The important numbers with the black voters is the Kerry number + the undecided. As you may remember from the 4th district race, African Americans voters can be hard to poll accurately, producing a larger number of undecideds than the overall population. The thing is, they (like other undecided voters) always break against the incumbent and with African Americans, historically break towards the Democrat, even though they told a pollster they hadn't made up their mind yet.
So what to make of the Strategic Visions poll? When I reweighted it to have AA turnout at 23% and white/other voters at 77% (the 2000 turnout number -- the state has actually gotten slightly less white since then) it turns out Bush's actual numbers are 50.35 while Kerry has 44.96. The undecided number is 4.69. If those undecideds break Kerry's way then this state could be very close.
Maybe they'll all see Zell Miller testify to Bush's greatness and change their mind, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Of course many people will say that you can't recklessly reweight a poll like this, and you can't just guess what the white/black numbers were for Bush and Kerry. To that, I challenge Strategic Visions to release the internal numbers for their poll so that we can reweight it correctly and figure out what's actually going on in this state.
Posted by Chris at August 6, 2004 06:06 PM
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