rickyp wrote:steve
The key statistic in all polling is this one: Obama's approval. As long as it is substantially under 50%, he is very unlikely to be reelected. Every polling expert will tell you this.
Those attitudes have helped shape their opinions of the president, with majorities disapproving of his overall job performance and his economic handling, and with nearly 75 percent saying that the Obama administration has fallen short of their expectations on the economy and improving oversight of Wall Street and the banks.
Yet despite those views, Obama continues to run ahead of the Republican presidential front-runners in hypothetical general-election match ups — leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by six points and former businessman Herman Cain by 15 points
.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45196665/ns ... sion_2012/So, splain again why disapproval is the key? They can't disapprove of the Presidents performance and yet dislike their options even more? The Wall Street Journal Poll seems to contradict what "every poliing expert will tell .. "
You really are not this thick, are you? I know you like to post the same arguments endlessly, but must you post the same questions endlessly too?
From your man,
Silver, who disputes the commonly held theory:Undecided voters, in other words, are the equivalent of the clock in a football game. If an N.F.L. team holds a 10-point lead at halftime, it is the favorite to go on and win the game. But there is plenty of football left to play, and it will lose some of the time (whereas other times, meanwhile, it will wind up winning by considerably more than 10 points). This is the equivalent of holding a 43-to-33 lead in a political poll, with lots of undecided voters.
On the other hand, an N.F.L. team that holds a 10-point lead with two minutes to play in the fourth quarter will almost never lose. (Nor, for that matter, is it likely to win by much more than 10 points.) This is analogous to having a 53-to-43 lead in the polls: barring the political equivalent of an onside kick and a Hail Mary, such a candidate can start picking out his office furniture.
So, if you’re willing to do so carefully, it is worth looking at the number of undecided voters in a poll. Given a lead of a certain size (say, 10 points), an incumbent (or a nonincumbent, for that matter) is more likely to lose the lead if there are more undecideds rather than fewer. This is not because the undecideds are especially likely to break for the challenger — something which just hasn’t been true to any meaningful extent in recent elections. It’s simply because there are more undecideds, period, and that implies greater volatility and means there is more campaigning left to do.
By the way, the theory espoused by Mr. Kraushaar and others isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is solid evidence that it used to be true, 20 or 25 years ago. Back then, the undecideds in a race usually could be counted upon to break toward the challenger: the name given to this phenomenon was the “incumbent rule.”
But polling has changed since then — as have social norms. On the one hand, pollsters have become more inclined to “push” voters toward an answer — if a voter declines to state a candidate preference initially, the pollster may ask her which candidate she is leaning toward, which may bring implicit preferences to the fore. On the other, voters have perhaps become more willing to advance a candidate preference based on information as thin as party identification. A conservative voter who is unhappy with the Democratic incumbent in their district, for instance, may be willing to note their support for the Republican opponent even if they have never heard of him or her before.
One last Polling 201 clarification: anti-incumbent sentiment may be unusually strong this year — and so perhaps the incumbent rule will make a reappearance (as it arguably did, for instance, in the New Jersey governor’s race in 2009). If I were an incumbent Democrat holding something like a 44-to-39 lead, I certainly wouldn’t feel overly sanguine about my position.
Of course, how did that 2010 election go for Congressional Democrats?
Also, it is important to note he is talking about polls right before the election. This poll you cite is a year from the election. The GOP nominee is not decided. Many people have no idea who the GOP candidates are, yes, even Romney suffers in name ID vs. the 100% name ID of the President.
The poll you cite: "The poll was conducted Nov. 2-5 of 1,000 adults (200 contacted by cell phone), and it has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points. "
"Adults" are not the ones "likely to vote."
Again, let's put our money on the line. I'm willing. Are you?
I've already proven that you know nothing about polling a year out. Your man cited two examples where polls changed dramatically over the last year.
If you want to put your faith in an "adult" poll that is within the margin of error a year before the election when Obama's numbers on the economy range from about 60 to 75% disapproval, let's go!
08 Nov 2011, 8:57 pm 
