*Note* – For those who noticed, yes, I am stopping my weekly ‘appointment’ posts. They were starting to irritate me 🙂 I hate writing by assignment and for that reason I probably wont participate in NaBloPoMo or anything like it again. Writing does not come naturally to me, but I like and want it to be fun and assigned writing is too much like school to me!
What is more up my alley are numbers. So polling has been fun to watch this election year. I can’t wait to see which one ends up closest to actual results. I get irritated by many though as they are rarely consistent. Some poll ‘likely’ voters. some poll ‘registered’ voters. Some flop between the two and often don’t tell you that they have. Many don’t release the internal breakdowns. And you can tell that many are publicized merely for their ‘news worthiness’. Ugh. Thankfully, Markos of DailyKos thinks like me and had enough of the mess. At the top of the site there now sits a three day poll result which updates each day. You can always click on the internals link to get the exact results. They use likely voters only and stick to that. Here are the results for 9/20/08. If you don’t want to go to the main site, then you can save the one I’ve linked to and just change the date in the address line to the most current. They are updated pretty early in the morning – around 8-9am est I think. The trendlines are a great visual aid as well. He got this up just after the GOP convention and it showed the post-Palin bump which the GOP ticket got and held onto for a few days. This past week has been a reversion back to pre-convetion numbers though right now I think it is higher for Obama than I have seen it. This hasn’t been a very good week for McCain. But, 40+ days is still plenty of time for things to swing again.
I’ll be back tomorrow with a different set of numbers – Pee Wee football scores 🙂
Trees & Flowers & Birds! 
I used to be in the Survey Research biz, including a stint at Field Research, one of the bigger firms in CA, which does the somewhat famous (at least in the biz) California Poll.
I can’t take any poll numbers I see seriously unless they give me some information about their methodology: what was their original sample size, how many attempts were made, what was their refusal rate, etc. Hell, you gotta show me the survey instrument before I’ll take any of this seriously. Most of these political polls are quick and dirty – call as many numbers as possible in as a short time as possible. And while you may get the numbers you need, what you have is a sample of those who are easy to reach and willing to talk to you. Hardly, a true sample of the American population.
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