Interesting read...
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/24/team-mccain-conference-call-polling/It’s been a while since I’ve jumped onto a Team McCain conference call, but today’s sounded interesting. They had Bill McInturff, their lead pollster, on hand to explain his analysis of John McCain’s standing in the race. With most public polls showing an incredibly close race on a national and state-by-state basis, except for the WaPo/ABC survey out today, it gave the media a chance to question McCain’s own pollsters about what they’re seeing.
McInturff says that the data has been remarkably stable throughout the month, despite the “extraordinary” events of the last couple of weeks. That’s true on a national basis as well as by state. A dozen states remain in the margin of error. McInturff looked at those states on a week-by-week basis, and it shows McCain weakening by two points in three weeks — well within the margins of error.
He then addressed the WaPo/ABC poll, and started it by giving us a quick rundown of his own experiences in media polling. He says the people who ran this survey “professionals” and “very competent”, but this is clearly an outlier.
McInturff points out the same 16-point difference between Democrats and Republicans as an indication that their sample is far out of tolerance. It should be somewhere between four and nine points, and nothing anywhere indicates a sixteen-point gap in party identification. In fact, we’ve never seen this kind of gap in at least 25 years of polling, not even in 1992 or 2006, two difficult years for Republicans. They’re expecting a five-point gap.
Bottom line: this poll was an outlier, and they’re discounting it.
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/24/team-mccain-conference-call-polling/