Oct 23 2008
Poll Dancing: Barack Obama and John McCain, Who is Really in the Lead?
Americans can be fickle. Ask them what their favorite foods are today and you may get a completely different answer tomorrow. One day we all are fans of a particular song and a month later, we laugh that we would even listen to something that bad. Case in point: how many of you are still doing the Macarena? I thought so.
During political elections, the primary method for gaging campaign success prior to the election is the political poll. Who are you going to vote for? Who do you think is doing a better job on the economy? Who dresses better?
Polls are interesting animals. Factors like how you ask the questions, who you are asking, what is happening in their lives at that moment, and how hungry they are can all produce different answers. I found a great post on Stats.com that explains the level of errors in polls:
One might point to sampling error (also called “margin of sampling error” or simply “margin of error”), which is a kind of error that we can expect from any poll – it is error that comes from the fact that we only polled some voters and not all of them. The more people who are polled the smaller the sampling error. The correct interpretation of the margin of sampling error is that it is measuring the range of values that we can be 95 percent confident reflects the true percentages of the whole population. As Rasmussen says of its polls,
“Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 1,000 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. The margin of sampling error—for the full sample of 3,000 Likely Voters–is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.”
This means that if the poll were conducted one hundred times (in the same circumstances, on the same day, etc), and a (possibly) different set of 3,000 likely voters answered the phone over a three-day period, we would expect to find that the results lie within the range of 48-52 percent support for Obama, and 43-47 percent support for McCain 95 times – and the other five times, we would expect to find a result outside of those ranges. This means that even in an ideal world the poll might get it wrong; there is no outcome that is technically impossible three weeks from now.
Based on that, how can one know truly who is in the lead and who is scrambling? Look at a sampling of today’s headlines you get both sides:
- POLL-Obama takes 10-point lead on McCain
- Poll: Obama neck and neck with McCain in rural areas of tossup states
- Poll: Obama ahead in Big Ten states
- AP poll puts McCain within 1 point of Obama
- Poll: Obama widens lead in Ohio
Whom do you believe in a sea of confusion like this? Obama is leading big. No, McCain is tied with Obama in key states. People have a 57% approval rating of Sarah Palin’s hair. The bottom line is, the only poll that matters is the one in November, the one that will decide who will be our next president.
In the mean time, here is a video of the Macarena. Come on, you know the moves, everybody join in!
