The Reality-Based Community

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

  • Home
  • About
  • BOTEC Analysis
You are here: Home / Reporting polling results as first differences

Reporting polling results as first differences

July 31, 2004 By Mark Kleiman @markarkleiman

We know how the 2000 Presidential race came out: it was close. Nothing has happened in the meantime to radically redraw the map. So the obvious way to handicap this year’s election is to assume that each party starts out with what it had last year, and ask about changes. For some reason, none of the polls I’ve seen have been reported that way, until the latest Zogby effort:

Mr. Kerry is showing a 2-to-1 lead (50% to 25%) amongst voters who didn’t vote in 2000, while winning three-quarters (75%) of Ralph Nader’s voters and stealing twice as many (8% to 4%) of Mr. Bush voters in 2000 than Bush is stealing of Gore voters in 2000.

That, plus some sort of effort to estimate the sizes of the various groups (and of the Bush/Gore vote among those who have died in the interim) ought to provide a reasonable guess about the outcome.

Of course, since this is an immediately post-Convention poll, you can’t take the current encouraging numbers too seriously. But my point is about method; I’d like to see all the pollsters report results in this format from here on out.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Blogroll

  • Balloon Juice
  • The Belgravia Dispatch
  • Brad DeLong
  • Cop in the ‘hood
  • Crooked Timber
  • Crooks and Liars
  • Echidne of the Snakes
  • Firedoglake
  • A Fistful of Euros
  • Healthinsurance.org Blog
  • Horizons
  • How Appealing
  • The Incidental Economist
  • Informed Comment — Juan Cole
  • Jonathan Bernstein
  • Kevin Drum
  • Marginal Revolution — Tyler Cowen
  • Marijuana Monitor
  • The Moderate Voice
  • Obsidian Wings
  • Patheos
  • Philosoraptor
  • Plato o Plomo — Alejandro Hope
  • Political Animal
  • Politics Upside Down
  • Progressive Blog Digest
  • Progressive Blue
  • Slacktivist
  • Snopes
  • Strange Doctrines
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Volokh Conspiracy (Washington Post)
  • Vox Pop

Recent Posts

  • Percentages and the pastrami panic…
  • Do professors care whether college students are actually learning?
  • Cannabis News Round-Up
  • Emergency
  • Weekend Film Recommendation: Hangover Square

Archives

Topic Areas

Copyright © 2017 The Reality-Based Community  •  Designed & Developed by ReadyMadeWeb LLC