Carl Bialik of The Wall Street Journal blogs weighs in on the poll.
John Zogby, the president and chief executive of Zogby International, released a statement on his Web site Tuesday that defended the poll in the face of heavy criticism from bloggers and some media organizations... But on Wednesday, Zogby told me he was on a book tour* when the contract was reached and when the survey was conducted, and wouldn’t have approved the poll in the form it took, or a press release posted on his firm’s Web site. “This was not Zogby International’s finest hour,” he said. “Something, somehow, fell through the cracks.” He said he would review the incident with his staff on Friday to determine what went wrong. Nonetheless, Zogby stood by the results of the poll themselves. “There is valuable information in this poll,” he said.So not a push poll... I suppose that's possible. It was taken after the election. But a misleading poll - I'm down with that.
...The poll was not, as election forecaster and Obama supporter Nate Silver originally called it, a “push poll,” because it was not an attempt to influence respondents by faking opinion research, as former pollster Mark Blumenthal explained on his blog. Blumenthal nonetheless agreed with Silver’s other criticisms, writing, “Describing his biased, leading questions as a legitimate test of knowledge is hugely misleading, at best.”
My I suggest you read the whole thing? Or not. Your call.
3 comments:
Misleading? How? Just because your voters proved to be idiots?
Misleading because, among other things, the sample size was too small and because they didn't also poll any McCain supporters to determine if there might be idiots in that bunch as well.
If the study was done to see if Obama supporters are idiots, then why would one need to poll McCain supporters?
If I'm doing a poll to see if people know who Justin Timerlake is, does it invalidate the poll if I don't ask them who Britney Spears is?
You are unhappy with the poll, because it shows that some of the people who voted for Obama had little knowledge about the candidates, except for what was spoon fed to them by the MSM.
Howard Stern did a similar "survey", when he sent one of his interns into Harlem to ask black Obama supporters various questions about Obama and his policies.
He had his intern ask the self-described Obama supporters if they were ok with Obama saying we had to stay in Iraq for 100 years, if they were ok with Obama being pro-life, and if they were ok with Obama selecting Sarah Palin to be his running mate.
None of the people Stern had on the tape (not sure how many he spoke with) had any problem with those positions for Obama. Was it scientific? No.
But it does go to show that you are/were right, Piker, race did play a factor in the election. Many voted for Obama not because of his positions, but because he was black.
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