Pollster.com cautions against putting too much stock in ARG poll -"polling on dark side of the moon"

[jefferson_dem]

...

Notice what happens to the Obama trend line just before and just after Rasmussen took a five-day break from interviewing, Wednesday through Sunday, over the Thanksgiving weekend (Thanksgiving was November 22). The regression trend line essentially splits the difference between the 17% low points immediately before and after the Thanksgiving break and the much higher 26% results that came just before and just after that. What one makes of the variation may be in the eye of the beholder. Either the Obama trend got unusually erratic in both directions during the last two weeks of November, or there was a very unusual and precipitous plunge from what should have been a plateau around 24-26 to 17% centered on the period of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving and the Monday just after. Either way, the Obama variation around Thanksgiving was highly statistically significant. It did not occur by chance alone. Either there was a see-saw in Obama's real world support that week, or something changed in the kinds of voters Rasmussen sampled.

Given what we know about the demographics of holiday travelers and Obama's supporters, I'd bet on the latter.

Now I should point out that the Rasmussen national tracking may be a special case. According to Scott Rasmussen, each daily sample is essentially "fresh." Unlike many other pollsters, they do not attempt to call back unavailable respondents on successive nights. If they sample your phone number on Monday and you are not home, they will not call you back again on Tuesday. As such, their surveys may be more prone to a holiday effect than others that do more callbacks. And while I believe that Rasmussen weights their samples by gender, age and race to force consistency for each four-day report, they may not weight by education.

All of this brings us to the survey that the American Research Group released on Monday fielded between Thursday December 20 through Sunday December 23, a survey that shows Clinton gaining and Obama falling. Some will read this post as an attempt to debunk that result, and the findings above certainly argue for considerable caution in reading results from any survey this week. But the problem in trying to assess the ARG poll is that we know so little about it. Does ARG make call-backs to unavailable respondents? What was the sample composition on any ARG Iowa survey this year in terms of age and education level, and was this one suddenly different? Did ARG weight the results by age or education this time, and if so, by how much? We are in the dark on all of these questions.

It is also worth remembering, as some commenters noted yesterday, that real changes may be occurring in vote preference this week even if surveys may be severely challenged in their ability to measure it. Clinton may be gaining and Obama falling. So it is quite a leap for anyone to say they know conclusively that the ARG result is either right or wrong.

The hard truth is that we are behind the dark side of the moon this week, and we may not know much with certainty until next Wednesday night.

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/polling_on_the_dark_side_of_th.php

[Bitwit1234]

1. Oh hell yeah.....we expected this didn't we...when the polled and

Obama was ahead by a point or two..the Heavenly chorus shilled and yelled and peed all over them selves....now the same poller says Hillary is ahead and guess what -- the Heavenly chorus says they don't matter...ha ha ha ha ha so damn typical of the American Idolers...can they phone it in.

[MadBadger]

2. I just saw this in New Republic

Michael Crowley put forward this argument that Obama's supporters are younger and most likely traveling, so this poll may not be highly accurate.

[suston96]

3. Don't put stock in this poll - or that one....or any one.....

..... if the poll looks too good to be true?

That's good advice.

[suston96]

4. Fun with polls.........

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/pollster_variation_in_iowa.php

Follow instructions...double click on graphs and figure them out - if you can.......