7 January 2006 - 2:11am
Americans want the broom, prefer Democratic Congress
That's the latest poll result to give the Rush-Ann-Bill crowd fits.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Dissatisfied with the nation's direction, Americans are leaning toward wanting a change in which political party leads Congress - preferring that Democrats take control, an AP-Ipsos poll found. Democrats are favored over Republicans 49 percent to 36 percent.
That's pretty good, considering that the Democrats aren't doing or saying much of anything these days. Maybe that's why.
"If the Democrats had any leadership or any message, they could be poised for a good year," Bond said. "But in the absence of that, they have not been able to capitalize on Republican woes. Because of the size of the GOP majority, Democrats have to run the board, and I don't see that happening."
Maybe this is an occasion for Democratic leaders to stop trying to seem more Republican and start stepping up and challenging runaway wingnuttery and pork-barrell feeding frenzies.
About a third of the public, 34 percent, approves of the job Congress is doing, and nearly twice as many - 63 percent - disapprove, according to the poll of 1,001 adults taken Jan. 3-5. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points. Public opinion of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress has been mixed, recent polling found.
"Neither one of the parties has done a very good job so far," said Cristal Mills, a political independent from Los Angeles. "They get away with murder, they get paid to pass certain things. It's the good ol' boy syndrome."
Lovely.
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Comments
Amazingly enough, that 49% to 36% poll rating matches the makeup of the sample. In short, when 49% of the people polled identify themselves as Democrats & 37% of the people polled identify themselves as Republicans, I'd expect that poll to turn out that way.
Considering that the official statistics on party registration on Election Day, 2004 was an even 37%-37% split, this AP-Ipsos poll is meaningless.
The truth is that I've been a poll studier for quite awhile now & AP=Ipsos is the least reliable of all polls because (a) they vastly oversample Democrats each time out and (b) the questions they ask are designed to elicit the desired response.
If you're going to go by polls, trust Rasmussen & Gallup's own poll. Most media polls are worthless, too.
Rassmussen in particular had excellent predictive ability in the last election. Virtually all of the actual vote percentages were within the margin of error of their predictions. They follow good statistical methodology and are very transparent in its application.
One of the reasons so many polls are inaccurate is they are based on formulas derived in the 60's. All polls use a form of stratified random sampling instead of a pure random sample. However, for this to work you must accurately identify the strata. Democrats have tended to be oversampled for four reasons.
First, Democrats used to be a much larger portion of the population in comparison to Republicans. The ratios have since evened out. Second, even when an area had the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans, it was valid to oversample the Democrats because they were able to get out a larger percentage of their base to vote on election day. That is no longer true. Data from 2004 suggests the parties are either at parity or the Republicans have a slight advantage here. This particular methodological error caused a lot of the election day voting polls to yield biased results in the 4-8% range. Third, polls are conducted by telephone, but only on land lines, not cell phones. This is causing all kinds of errors in the sampling, but the bias is harder to predict. Socioeconomic, regional and time of year factors all heavily influence the results. Fourth, depending on the contact method, it has been found that Democrats and Republicans actually bother to answer the poller's questions at a different rate. This was especially true of election day voting polls. Democrats were much more likely to actually stop and talk to the poller than Republicans were. This throws a monkey wrench into the entire stochastic response assumption and requires more training of polling personnel. Something most polling agencies, especially media, do not adjust for.
The net result of these changes is that accurate polling requires a good mathematical understanding of the underlying voter strata. Many of the polling organizations just plain don't do all their homework and allow bias and heteroscedasticity errors to unduly influence their results.
This is not to suggest that polling now is less accurate than it was in the past. It wasn't that accurate in the past. Witness Dewey-Truman. The difference now is we pay more attention to it and lots more groups conduct polls. However, many of those groups do a poor job of it.
Sorry post was so long, but it is hard to condense statistics terms into English without confusing the hell out of everyone.
First of all, rejecting a poll because you don't agree with the results is rather silly. A lot has changed since election day, or, um, don't you look at the polls?
Second, if you think only some polls pay attention to how they pose the questions and how that may elecit certain results, then I'd like to know where you got your rose-colored glasses.
I don't trust any polls beyond a certain point, really. But they are news, and they do seem to affect the political climate.