Hubris; nemesis.
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With the caveat that I'm by no means a polling expert, Lifetime's poll from Politico:
Since picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has obliterated what had been a 34-percentage-point deficit in a poll of likely women voters on the question of which candidate has a “better understanding of women and what is important” to them.
Did I mention that McCain is old? Alas for the OFB, as it turns out, "old" is not the same as "stupid." What a shame.
The two are now effectively tied, with McCain's 44 to 42 percentage lead within the margin of error of the most recent poll conducted by pollsters Kellyanne Conway and Celinda Lake for Lifetime Television. In Lifetime's July poll, women preferred Barack Obama on the same question by nearly three-to-one— 52 to 18 percent.
In this latest poll, conducted Sept. 11-15, age remained a key determinant in response to the question about women’s concerns. Young women, ages 18-34, chose the Obama/Biden ticket as more empathetic to their needs, while women aged 35-64 went for McCain/Palin. Unlike black and Hispanic women, White women saw McCain and Palin as most understanding of their concerns.
About one in four women who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries now said McCain and Palin have a better grasp of women’s needs than Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden.
Cue the chorus of OFB casting blame and hurling insults instead of trying to win their votes!
Guess the whole misogyny thing isn't working nearly as well for Obama in the general as it did in the primary. After hubris, nemesis. What a shame.
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Sampling size
I always wonder about the methodology of these polls: is it random, what is a sample size, who the hell watches lifetime TV, etc? In this case the phone poll was not quite random.
http://www.mylifetime.com/community/my-l...
I wonder what percentage of the initial 500 women polled were white, Hispanic, African-American, Asian (they do exist and vote too), Middle-Eastern?
Yeah, I noticed the 4.4%
Not sure why you say that's not random.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Random by scientific standards* implies lack of bias
In this case, pollsters conducted a random telephone survey of 500 women. If they wanted to be random in there selection, they should have analyzed the data at that point.
Instead, they determined that surveyed population did not provide sufficient sample of African-American and Hispanic women (probably sample size in these two categories was too small to generate good stats), and added 100 more African-American women and 100 more Hispanic women. A more appropriate alternative would have been analyzing data collected from equal number of representatives of each group.
Except
the results for all women was from a random sample of all women (the "main" sample), as it should be.
The additional 100 AA or Hispanic women were to get larger sample sizes for the AA women or Hispanic women only, and only used to report results for those subgroups, not in the results for the "main" sample.
The alternative is to poll thousands of more women until you get significant enough samples to extract significant data for the AA and Hispanic subgroups, which is considerably more expensive but no more accurate for the subgroups (which the quote states have a large margin of error).
random...
(I'm assuming tartu is saying that the polling was not random because of the additional groups of AA and Hispanic women who were polled. I assume that was done to keep the margin of error for those subgroups from being absurdly large.)
Polling is rarely if ever done purely at random, for very good reasons. (It's probably impossible to get a random sample of your target population, most of the time.) Generally AFAIK the big polls work from a (more-or-less) randomly chosen list of phone numbers, but they stratify their samples to try and make them more representative of the people (registered voters or whatever group) they want to poll, to make sure all relevant subgroups are being represented in the poll appropriately.
For example, I got a call yesterday from one who asked to speak to someone in the household who was a registered voter (that would be me), then asked the year I was born in, then asked if I were a man or a woman (hmmmmmm... good he didn't assume, I guess) and then finally, on finding I was a woman, asked to speak with the oldest male registered voter in the household. As it happens, there isn't one, so that was that. But clearly that poll had hit its quota of women in my age group and he was angling for another group they needed to fill.
There is a pretty good explanation of stratified random sampling and why it's used here. [Long and uses scary math notation in spots, but scroll down to "stratified random sampling" and its drawings.]
I'll now climb down off my lectern... ;)
my reply is lost
somewhere in the ether [it found it's way out] That is exactly what I meant in my post.
I understand the usefulness of stratified sampling, it would just be nice to know what was the representation in the initial sample of 500 and what geographic areas where they sampling (I imaging, sampling on the West Side of Chicago, in Kenosha, in Mission District of SF and in DC will result in markedly different results and voter concerns.)
For the record, math is never scary, statistics on the other hand...
And, Alas...
San Juan could have put Hillary Clinton on his ticket and still would be bad on most women's issues. But, hey, it worked, at least nation-wide.
Here in Michigan, Palin seems to be losing steam. Though, I'd most likely chalk it up to the economy more than anything on Palin:
Palin's appeal slips for some women, recent poll shows
Just to note, EPIC-MRA is probably the best polling firm in Michigan. I only mention that because if anyone comes across their polls for Michigan in coming months, I want folks to know how accurate they usually are.
Conway and Lake
are the Democratic Party's most reliable pollsters. If these polls were about race, there wouldn't be questions about sample size.
Great post, lambert.
These polls appear quite conclusive.
Kellyanne Conway is a registered Republican,
active Republican spokesperson and dedicated pro-Republican cheerleader. Other than that, I'm sure she would never try to stir up trouble around tensions between the Democratic Party and white women.; Republicans are always unbiased, and every report from their polling professionals should be accepted without challenge.
Celinda Lake, on the other hand, actually is a Democrat, with some thoughts on the probable duration and size of this Palin ah Bump. She and Conway are a bit too close for my taste, but then I'm so Olde Skool.
From your own linky goodness on MSNBC re: Conway.
A direct quote:
Soooo... that's the bookmark you keep handy to demonstrate that Conway exploits Dem-Fem tensions??
lake was a republican
until she went off to college and got reprogrammed. or so she says.
& Hillary was a Goldwater Girl--
and we still don't know how Obama voted in 80 and 84 (and 88 and 92, etc), do we?
celinda lake gave us
gac, which is the real reason i don't trust her.
And so much for Celinda Lake!
Excellent dot connecting, Hipp (may I call you Hipp, in the Corrente tradition of abbreviating handles?)
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
of course you may!
[ever since this, i'd considered renaming myself hipp hussein archia.]
i won't go so far as to say it completely disposes of her, but i'll never trust anything she ever says, and i'm going to have very little faith in anyone who trusts what she says.
What women really want
Looks like they wrote a book together, What Women Really Want: How American Women Are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live and Lake Research Partners is one of the most reliable Democratic polling companies.
Celinda Lake is president of Lake Research Partners and is one of the Democratic Party's leading political strategists, serving as tactician and senior adviser to the national party committees, dozens of Democratic incumbents and challengers at all levels of the electoral process.
Celinda Lake, a leading political strategist for the Democratic party and one of the nation's foremost experts on electing women candidates, and Kellyanne Conway, a leading conservative pollster and president and CEO of The Polling Company, INC -- themselves cross the aisle to reveal the ways in which a newly defined, united power base among women is reshaping the state of our nation much more than the two-sided politics of Left and Right.
chief white woman?
what, they're like a native american tribe now?
...anyway, polls like this both do and don't worry me. i think the more women see/hear of Palin, the more that support is going to evaporate. she's mean, and used her own kids as a prop. that stinks, to most decent women and the ones who like her were never going to vote for obama anyway. further, this election is going to be determined along the lines of the electoral college. random or not, general polls don't tell the important story.
it bothers me a little to recognize how, well, stupid a lot of people can be re: Palin's "feminism." but there are a lot of low information types out there, and propaganda and the SCLM exist because they work. i'm at the point, after years of blogging media 'pushback,' that i really don't know what is to be done about that. obama has said, iirc, that he's not interested in a new Fairness Doctrine or anything like that. it will bite him on the ass later, but you already know that.
42 percent aren't voting for Obama
The same number of Clinton supporters since she dropped out in June. More than half say it has nothing to do with the VP choices.