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a shrill neo-con
Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
The argument that the polls are suddenly turning up too many R id's and so must be weighted back down is sort of troubling. The CW has always been, D's make up X% of the electorate, and so a disproportionate weighting should be corrected. But, historically, this approach has been shown to be less than accurate when compared to final results. Plus, while we here tend to know our own label, there are scads of casual voters who probably switch back and forth, depending on who they're voting for ("today I favor Kerry, so today I'm a Democrat"). At a certain point, this corrective factor can be carried too far. There is a valid argument that you should not use it at all - it becomes circular, in that you are polling, and then weighting the poll to correct for the disparity in answers (i.e., this poll shows 65% favoring Kerry, so we should weight the non-Kerry votes to make up for that imbalance.")
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OTOH, it's hard to believe that party identification is really changing as much as quickly as you would believe from some recent polls, which naturally leads you to question their results.
It's a pretty inexact science.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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