Years ago, there used to be a genre of humor called Polish jokes. given the results of recent polling, there is a new meaning to the term. Yesterday, I wrote about the massive Rasmussen poll which showed Obama with only 45% support for re-election. Today, the media is gushing about the new AP poll which shows Obama with 60% job approval. Sure, Rasmussen's poll was of an unusually large number of likely voters while the AP polled 1000 adults, but that cannot explain the different results of the two polls. Adults do not limit those questioned to those who are registered to vote or those likely to vote, but unless there is about 20% of the population which has no intention to vote but which support Obama by margins like 4 to 1, the polls conflict.
The internals of the two polls have not been released, so there is no way to see if the samples are biased. We know that in the past some polls by the AP included an extra 5% or so of Democrats which skewed the results strongly towards Obama, but that may not be the case this time.
I guess that we have to just wait and see what happens.
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