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October 09, 2004

Survey USA

While I do not expect Kerry to win Georgia, I would caution anyone to take Survey USA's Georgia polls that seriously. I can't comment on other states because I don't live there or know the geography that well, but I can tell you the following:

It seems that SUSA overweights suburban respondents. According to them, only 11% of Georgian's live in a big city and a whopping 55% are suburban. Other polls I've seen do a better job of breaking this down, but usually the urban number (where both Majette and Kerry lead) is closer to 18 or 20, and the true suburban number is more like 35. Survey USA gets rid of the small town choice, so really you're left without that option.

Another thing I'd point out is that their partisan and ideological ids seem to be a little off. 47% of the state is conservative while only 11% is liberal? Probably more like 40% self id's as strictly conservative while closer to 20% id's as liberal. They have Republicans with about a 10 point edge, ARG actually gave Democrats a 4 point edge and other polls have similarly given Republicans a small edge within the margin of error.

They also have Bush and Isakson with astronomical leads among white voters. What this basically says is that the average white voter in Georgia is just like the average white voter in Forsyth County, and I can tell you that the average white voter in Georgia is actually 10-15 points more Democratic than the average Forsyth resident.

So take this SUSA poll with a grain of salt. Maybe it's because they take the first X number of respondents that they get. From what it looks like, they don't do many callbacks or pairings, and other pollsters just wouldn't do that. Now here is the problem with trying to "right" a poll that seems wrong...when you have methodological errors that throw the whole poll out of whack, it's hard to do a correction at all. I could speculate that just talking to voters in Georgia who are at home for the first phone call they get skews the poll Republican -- it certainly seems that way. But there is no way to be sure.

And so the best thing to do is just take this poll with a big grain of salt. Al Gore won DeKalb county with about 71% of the vote last time. DeKalb is about 55% black, 35% white and 10% other. According to SUSA, Kerry can expect to get about 59.5% this time in DeKalb. Do you think that's going to happen?

Posted by Chris at October 9, 2004 09:24 AM

Comments

There is no way to account for suburban population misproportions....how are you going to make that up?

Posted by: Shannon Marietta [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 10, 2004 10:35 PM

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