I Hate Having The First Four Threads But The Great Nate Bumped Up Obama's Reelect To 66%

[DemocratSinceBirth]

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

[Dawson Leery]

1. 66%

[regnaD kciN]

2. "The Great and Powerful Nate has spoken!"

He'll drop it again tomorrow, after the PPP numbers come out...

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. PPP Is A Robocaller

PPP is a robocaller and consequently has to weight their polls to reflect a cell phone using population they samply can't reach, Peter Miller, a recent president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, points out the root problem with weighting: “The more you rely on weights, the more you risk being wrong for reasons you don’t understand.”

[regnaD kciN]

4. True...

...but Mr. Silver has certainly shown a predilection for taking dodgy polls (Exhibit A: Gravis) at face value -- and PPP is cetainly more credible than some of them.

Besides, if PPP is such an utterly-unreliable pollster, shouldn't we have shrugged-off their O+5 (and with a 50-point lead among the 19% who have supposedly voted) Ohio poll from a couple of days ago, instead of clinging to it like a lifeline?

Still, Kos's "warning," combined with his contrast between their national and state results, does sound like it might carry a subtext of doubt about their results. DKos hasn't exactly had good luck with their polling firms -- remember that they dumped their previous pollster, Research2000, after uncovering evidence suggesting that R2K was "cooking" their results. So I would think that Kos would be super-sensitive to any anomalies with this one as well.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. I Think PPP Was The Third Or Fourth Public Pollster To Show O Holding On To A OH Lead, However Small

If you asked Nate why he agrees to include all poll even crappy ones he would say because the law of large numbers assumes good data will cancel out bad data.


I just think it's silly to obsess over this poll or that poll instead of looking at all the polls.

As to Markos Moulitsas it must be mortifying to have to publish a national poll that is more GOP friendly than Rasmussen.

[geek tragedy]

6. PPP was bad for Obama last week.

24 hours from now we'll know who's going to win.

Obama needs more than to show up--he needs something interesting to say. Content and delivery both matter.