| In light of the recent Quinnipiac poll showing Norm Coleman leading Al Franken 52-39 (and the subsequent admission by the pollster that those numbers are probably off by a few points), I thought I'd break down the polling in the race so far by pollster.
The results are telling. The bottom-line question is this: who do you trust more, Rasmussen or SurveyUSA?
Here's a graph of the entire race, with all polls and pollsters so far included:
And here are Rasmussen's results so far:
And the same for SurveyUSA:
As has been noted many times before, a poll is a statistical snapshot in time. You want to get a good picture of the motion in a race, you need a series of snapshots. The only two pollsters who have such series are SurveyUSA and Rasmussen, but they present very different pictures of the race over time. Rasmussen has shown both candidates getting closer to the 45% mark, with the nebulous 10% in the middle left to decide, while SurveyUSA showed Franken peaking in February of this year and declining since then.
So who's right? Both would tell you their methodology is fair, but SurveyUSA's polls use a ridiculous self-identified partisan split -- that's one caveat. Another is the historical unpredictability of state-level polls -- with relatively low numbers of respondents, it's difficult to get accurate pictures of the electorate's feeling. Another is the likely voter model -- with so many voters getting engaged in Barack Obama's campaign when they have not previously been politically active, and a nationwide yearning for change, pollsters are going to have difficulty determining what constitutes a "likely voter."
So what's the picture? Watch the ads, go to speeches and debates, and find out for yourself. The polls won't tell you much unless you've already decided which candidate you're supporting. |
