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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2008-01-18

How Will This Poll Be Spun? 

CNN put out its new poll tonight. The easy headline for Republicans will be "McCain Surging In National Poll. But you need to look closer.

Question 1: Who Do You Support (GOP) ?
McCain 29% (DOWN 5% from a week ago), Huckabee 20% (Down 1% from last week), Romney 19% (UP 5%)

Hmmmmmm. Don't expect to see this story "McCain national lead shrinking"

Page 7: ALL RESULTS ON THIS PAGE ARE SHOWN FOR REGISTERED DEMOCRATS.

Its important to note that for the first part of the poll, only the Democrats' results are separated out into Blacks and Whites. This becomes important later on down the poll, since this caveat is not retracted, the separation comes and goes, and its not certain what applies and what doesn't. For instance . . .

Question 15: In general, how would you say things are going for the U.S. in Iraq?

Total Well: 46%
Total Badly: 54%

Just on its face, this is a startling number. The last time CNN asked this question was November 2-4, and the Total Well number was only 32%. In ten weeks, Americans have managed to notice that things are improving--even with the silence from the media. But if you consider that its unclear if that only applies to Democrats . . . that's unbelievable. Which is why I think that this was probably for all respondents, even though CNN does not make that information easy to find.

But this poll also deliberately oversamples blacks, so even at that, 46 is an amazing number. Looking a little closer down below the chart shows that, among whites, the majority (51%) believes the war is now going well.

Waiting to hear that headline? Yeah, me neither.

I think this poll may make a little news, but is ultimately probably little better than useless. The "professional journalists" will only report the pieces of the poll that serve their story lines, and the truly interesting things will never see the light of day.

As usual.
Posted by: Michael / 1/18/2008 10:29:00 PM

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