I was catching up on my reading and I was struck by two drastically different polls about the MA Senate race to replace Senator Kennedy. The first poll I came across was from Public Policy Polling and was released on January 9, 2010. This poll had the following to say:
“The race to replace Senator Ted Kennedy in the Senate is looking like a toss up, with Republican Scott Brown up 48 to 47 on Martha Coakley… PPP surveyed 744 likely Massachusetts voters from January 7th to 9th. The margin of error is +/-3.6%.”
The next poll I came across within minutes of this one I might add was reported by the Boston Globe om 1/10/10 and had this to say:
“Democrat Martha Coakley, buoyed by her durable statewide popularity, enjoys a solid, 15-percentage-point lead over Republican rival Scott Brown as the race for US Senate enters the homestretch, according to a new Boston Globe poll of likely voters. …The poll, conducted Jan. 2 to 6, sampled the views of 554 randomly selected likely voters. The poll has a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.”
Now I’m not a statistician or a polling expert but there’s something wrong with these numbers. Is it an issue of methodology, sample size, segment selection, polling bias, political bias by the polling firms, timing or some other factor that leads to these huge discrepancies in this critical race for Senate?
I was curious to see if Nate Silver at 538 had covered Public Policy Polling in any recent articles. The only thing that I found in a quick search was this quote in an article about the potential polling bias that Rasmussen Polling has been accused of by many liberal bloggers:
“The polling firm Public Policy Polling has also tended to show poor results for Democratic candidates in its 2010 polling, relative to other pollsters like Quinnipiac. But Public Policy Polling is a Democratic polling firm. Are they biased too?”
Update: According to MyDD, PPP will be going back into the field to conduct a poll before next Tuesday’s election.
Apparently, the Boston Globe does as lousy a job as the NYT. No matter – both will be gone in a year or so.
win or lose in this race the democrats are in trouble, GOD BLESS AMERICA.
GO CONSERVATIVES