http://www.politicususa.com/2014/05/19/politicos-poll-showing-democrats-trouble-midterm-election-total-crock.html
smiling faces http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgA2Sn3b6OM
This week, political news site Politico released a poll showing that Democrats are at a seven-point disadvantage against Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. The poll is supposed to reflect voter sentiments in the most competitive House and Senate races this year. For the House races, the poll shows that Democrats trail Republicans by 9 points, 39% -30%. As for the Senate, Republicans hold a seven-point advantage, 43% -36%. This poll seems to predict a gloomy outcome for the Democrats in November. It is certainly possible that Republicans can gain control of the Senate and retain their majority on the House. However, this poll is a total crock.
It is always important to look into the methodology used by a poll to see how credible it is. In this instance, the poll was tilted heavily in Republicans’ favor from the outset, creating the results that we see. The claim of the poll is to show ‘competitive’ House and Senate races, so the interviewees were only from those areas. Yet, the poll shows that 39% of the respondents are Republicans. 34% stated that they’re Democrats. Only 26% identified as independents. Compare this with the country at large, where 31% identify are registered with the Democratic Party, 25% identify as Republican and 42% claim to be independent.
Along racial demographics, this poll’s respondents are mostly white. While less than 64% of this country now identifies as being non-Hispanic white, 77% of those interviewed by Politico’s polling firm are white. Only 7% of those polled are Hispanic, despite Hispanics making up over 16% of the population now. Even when going based on likely voter percentages, it still provides a skewed total. Non-Hispanic whites represented less than 74% of the actual voters in the last election and 73% of the registered voters. Considering the efforts to get more Hispanics registered and engaged, it would seem like they are underrepresented in this poll. But, once again, it could just be the districts and states.and there it is republicans like to refer to cooking things they speak from experience, they have loss so many elections lately they are primed to cook numbers and polls as well as their "great chance to take the senate and keep the house forgetting they technically loss the house 2012 by 1.4 million votes something they ignore and credit their razzle dazzle as the people speaking in their favor. i still would like to know where's the noise of those million plus voters who's vote and voice were stolen by republicans.
There’s another piece of data that strains the credibility of this poll. While we’ve already pointed out how the poll is skewed to represent old, white Republicans, it is possible that this is just what the data provides in these competitive races. However, when it is broken down by region, we see that 31% of the respondents are from the South Atlantic. However, this region represents only three of the 16 Senate races this poll is supposed to cover (Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina) as well as eleven (four in Florida, one in Georgia, one in North Carolina, three in West Virginia, two in Virginia) of sixty House races. So, even though the South Atlantic only accounts for 18.75% of the competitive Senate races and 18.33% of the House races, Southern voters make up nearly one-third of the poll’s respondents.
Now, it could be that the combined population of the districts and states for the South Atlantic is greater than that of the other races they are polling, leading to the preponderance of Southern voters in this poll. However, when you combine all of these little outliers we see in this poll together, you get a very Republican-friendly result. Basically, you have a bunch of old, white, Southern voters who are still angry about Obamacare, despite the fact that the rest of the country has moved on (60% of respondents stated that we should still be debating the health care law, which is pretty much the opposite of what we’ve seen in recent nationwide polls.)the bottom line according to this article which seems careful to say could be too much when the evidence leads more to right wing stirring of the pot and and the "extra ingredients" they add to it that makes it look, smell and taste like them. they show those crap eating grins because they think they have rigged re-rigged and cheated their way into office, well they thought the same thing 2012!!!
