The poll produced a huge amount of information. It's startling to realize, when you look at the demographic data, how much more information is available in a poll than just the simple percentages in response to the question.
More on that later. The poll came up with some powerful findings which this article will discuss. For starters 85% of Democrats are more likely to support a candidate who supports impeachment.
100% of the African Americans in the poll-- 109-- now believe that the Iraq war was unjustified. Zero percent of the African Americans polled support the appointment of Alito to the Supreme Court. 80.3% oppose it and 19.7 percent are not sure. That helps explain the huge drop in support PA Senatorial candidate Bob Casey sees from African Americans when they learn his positions. How huge?
Casey loses virtually 50% of his African American support (think Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) I was shocked until I checked the poll's issue question demographics and found how strongly the African American Community feels about those two issues.
This gets even more interesting when we consider that Governor Rendell, Casey's biggest supporter, will be running against African American pro-football player Lynn Swann. Philly and Pittsburgh Blacks, who Rendell must retain, to win, will be choking on their vote for Casey, ready to find a way to punish the Democratic Insiders who betrayed them by fielding Casey. I think they'll abandon Rendell and support Swann in damaging numbers. Of course, if there's a solid progressive on the Democratic side, they will be much more likely to support the whole party line ticket. Tough dilemma for Rendell.
The thing is, most poll reports just give the straight answer numbers-- Santorum vs. Casey... period. That's what the pollsters in Pennsylvania have been doing for months (shame on them for practicing polling that supports one candidate!)
My goal was to work with a highly respected pollster who would help me get answers that would go deeper. My Goal for the People's Poll was to get straight answers and to find out how people really think if they don't get information filtered the way the right wing feeds it to the main stream media, and the way the main stream media pay pollsters to ask questions that set up answers which support the echo chamber.
Here is the methodology for the poll: Zogby International conducted interviews of 850 likely voters online. Panelists who have agreed to participate in Zogby polls online were invited to participate in the survey. The online poll ran from 1/26/06 through 1/27/06. The margin of error is +/- 3.8 percentage points. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups. Slight weights were added to party, age, race, religion, and gender to more accurately reflect the population.
I wanted to include all the declared candidates, something none of the other polls did. I wanted to makes sure the panelist taking the poll knew something about all the candidates. So I phoned each campaign, told them I was doing the poll, let them know they would be getting an email, sent out at the same time, asking them for short answers to questions on where they stand on key issues. I made it clear that I would construct a profile of each candidate who did not reply.
All the candidates seemed to be agreeable. I gave the candidates three days to respond. Casey's response didn't arrive, so I called my contact at his campaign. After the deadline, the Casey camp responded by email that they would not participate. I sent one more email, reiterating that I would be constructing his positions from public statements if he didn't reply. He didn't, so I constructed the statements. Not that controversial. He's anti-abortion, anti-stem-cell. All the questions in the poll are on the OpEdNews site, including the statements about each candidate, here:
Now, the stats on the African Americans are not on the site. There is a lot more to polling than meets the eye. In the last few days I've spoken to a number of pretty high visibility progressive pundits and it's amazing, well maybe not, that they've never really seen the insides of a real poll. The amount of information is mind boggling. There are about 70 different stats for each question-- not just the four or six the regular poll data shows.
We don't usually see these stats. The political people do. I'm sure that Santorum and Casey have run polls that tell them their strengths and weaknesses in the different demographic groups.
I wrote an article on this: The Power, the Gold and Inside Secrets of Polling What you don't know about polling; The OpEdNews.com/Zogby People's Poll found that people oppose the Nuclear option, who opposes Alito, which demographic group dropped 50% in support of Casey when they learn his policies, strong support for Free candidate air time and no contribution campaigns, majority feel Bush broke law and lots more
I won't publish the demographics for the horserace part of the poll because they're too valuable to the opposition. But I am publishing a few questions worth of basic stats and demographics on issue questions relating to electronic voting, paper ballots and election reform. The basic numbers are pretty staggering.
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