Search This Blog

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Polling confusion

The poll numbers for president obama's job approval continue to jump around mysteriously. CBS/NY Times is out with a poll that shows a 57-37 approval while Newsweek/Daily Beast has a poll showing 49-48 disapproval. Both are polls of adults rather than registered or likely voters, so the difference is not from that distinction. Both polls used samples of about the same size. Meanwhile, according to Drudge, the Rasmussen daily poll also shows a net disapproval by 1%. Rasmussen has a much larger sample, but only two thirds of the people were questioned after the events with Bin Laden.

What does this all mean? Well, the majority of the polls taken since the death of Bin Laden show little movement in approval numbers but there are two that show big moves. I do not think that one can reconcile the polls absent detailed information about the sample. Even then, the results seem strange. We will have to wait for a week or two to pass before we can see a consistent trend appear.

No comments: