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September 12, 2004

Poll Watching

I hate to get all Ruy Texiera on y'all, but the new Newsweek Poll seems a little skewed Republican. Their overall RV number is 49-43 Bush (in a 3 way race). But their sample size is 41% Republican, 31% Democratic and 28% Independent. If the much maligned LA Times poll from a few months ago with reversed numbers was off then this one is probably off too, or else Democrats are in big trouble (which is also possibility).

Anyway, the split for Kerry in the subsamples is 4-93 among Republican respondents, 87-7 among Democrats, and 45-39 among independents. If you reweight all these subgroups equally (33-33-33) then the new Bush-Kerry number is 46-45. Which is not bad. There are a higher number of undecideds among Democrats and Independents.
If you reweight 40-40-20 then the new number is 48-46 in Bush's favor, which is closer to the Zogby and Gallup results (it doesn't look like Newsweek is using much of a screen, which should be similar to Gallup's RV numbers).

So why do I think the poll skews Republican and not think that there is a massive shift going on, ala the week before the 2002 General Election? Well part of it is that Southern whites are choosing Bush 66-28. In Georgia, if Bush gets 66% of the white vote, 10% of the black vote and splits the non-black, non-white vote 50/50, it's projected that the final results would be Bush 52, Kerry 48. Even if half of the undecided Southern whites break for Bush it's 54-46.

That's no improvement over Al Gore, and the previous result (52-48) makes Georgia seem very competitive. And if Georgia is in play, then this is not a good poll for George W. Bush. On the other hand, it is not a good poll for Kerry either. But here is a comparison with this poll's internals and the previous week's "huge Bush bounce" poll in ():

So, no Bush improvement on any measure. This week's Newsweek poll was much more Republican (3 points more) and much less independent (3 points less). Like I said, this is bad news for Bush but not good news for Kerry. If those undecideds swing against Bush he's toast. It's not likely that they'll swing for him -- and when you consider that the Bush strategy seems to be to ramp up cynicism to get the undecideds to stay home or skip the top race, this poll pretty much confirms why the B/C campaign is doing that.

Posted by Chris at September 12, 2004 10:58 PM

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