Columbus Dispatch Poll in Sunday's paper 3-26-06
That Great polling operation known as The Columbus Dispatch was at it again.It would be nice if the Dispatch published the actual questionaire for us enquiring minds to evaluate and state clearly if the polling pool was with "likely" voters or with "registered" voters.(This was a little fuzzy in their explanation on how the poll was conducted) At any rate,the Dispatch's last pre-election poll was a COLLOSSAL MISS the MARK and courtesy of BizzyBlog.com we have these details:
OK, maybe the Blissful Bunch is a bunch of partisan hacks comfortably secure in a university setting. But what explains The Columbus Dispatch’s poll of Oct. 24 through Nov. 3? It seems in reasonable order: 1,872 registered voters (note: NOT likely voters) and a 2.5% margin of error (again from Swing State; percentages sometimes don’t add up to 100% because of rounding):
Issue 2–Yes: 59%; No: 33%; Undecided: 9%
Issue 3–Yes: 61%; No: 25%; Undecided: 14%
Issue 4–Yes: 31%; No: 45%; Undecided: 25%
Issue 5–Yes: 41%; No: 43%; Undecided: 16%
The self-named “Central Ohio’s Premier Information Source” is eating crow by the kilo today. Even if you treat all Undecideds as “Nos,” the final “Yes” tallies were lower than the poll’s results wrong by 23, 28, 1 and 11 points, respectively.
In 30 years of following election results, I don’t think I have ever seen poll vs. actual differences like this. I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen differences of more than 10 points, let alone 28. They’re supposed to be getting better at this, not going into the toilet. I could have thrown darts and come closer than Bliss and the Dispatch did.
So it’s safe to say that until we see proof otherwise, polls taken in Ohio are worse than worthless, and in fact can be assumed to be at least 10 points off, if not more, in a Democrat and/or liberal direction.
BizzyBlog....WELL SAID and WELL ADVISED
Puger Gee Calabalini