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CNN snap poll oversamples Democrats

You may be hearing about a snap poll from CNN taken right after President Obama's speech last night that shows a gain in support for his health care proposal, from 53% to 67% in favor.

While it is true that the president picked up support in the poll, what you won't hear is how that poll oversampled Democratic voters by a wide margin:

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted just before and just after the president's speech, with 427 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

The sample of speech-watchers in this poll was 45 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican. Our best estimate of the number of Democrats in the voting age population as a whole indicates that the sample is about 8-10 points more Democratic than the population as a whole.

I've heard this poll referenced several times already by the media. No one is mentioning the oversample of Democrats.

Comments

So what is it when you reweight the poll to the generic ballot numbers?

I'm betting it shows a loss.

Oh, and +-5% is a huge margin for error--not great for drawing conclusions from.

Anything with a margin of error over 3% is considered statistically unsound. The poll is useless.

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