49 Percent

With 16 months to go before the 2012 presidential elections, it’s silly to rely on polls to provide any insight whatsoever into the public’s view of the candidates. However, one thing is clear—polls can be used as propaganda tools. After all, if you work to convince the public that a candidate is popular or unpopular, it may sway those on the fence.

When the latest NBC/WSJ poll was released yesterday, I was surprised to see that President Obama had a 49 percent overall approval rating. After all, his administration’s performance on the economy has been abysmal, and people normally vote their pocketbooks.

But then I took a look at the population of people who participated in the poll, and things became very clear indeed. The datatechguy blog reports:

We’ll start with the splits [of those who participated in the poll]:

Strong Democrat …………….. 19
Not very strong Democrat ….. 13
Independent/lean Democrat …10
Strictly Independent ………….14
Independent/lean Republican ..10
Not very strong Republican ….11
Strong Republican …………….13
Other (VOL) …………………… 8
Not sure ……………………….. 2

So this means that the skew of the poll to begin with is 42% dem vs 34% GOP. Gee do ya think an 8 point difference in party affiliation might have something to do with the numbers? I’d say polling nearly 25% more democrats than republicans might help the democrats bottom line figures a tad.

Now lets see how those people voted last time

Voted for Barack Obama ….. 42
Voted for John McCain ……. 32
Voted for someone else ……. 5
Not sure ……………………… 3
No, Did Not Vote …………… 18
Not sure ………………………. -

The spread of Obama voters vs McCain voters in this sample is 3 points greater than his actual 2008 election spread but lets look deeper:

Nearly 1 in 5 of the people who answer claimed they did not vote last time in an election that drew huge turn out, so lets extrapolate those figures without the 18% that claim they didn’t vote. What kind of spread does that leave us compared to the actual 2008 results (52.9 Obama vs 45.7 McCain)?

Voted for Barack Obama ….. 52
Voted for John McCain ……. 40
Voted for someone else ……. 6%

In the last election President Obama got 52.9% of the vote so the poll reflects that figure within 1% but John McCain got 45.7% of the vote. This means this poll under-represents McCain voters by over 11%

Hmmm. The 49 percent approval number is misleading and clearly biased.

I’m not the least bit surprised that NBC reported the 49% result without providing context. After all, NBC has been a shill for President Obama since his 2008 campaign. But The Wall Street Journal allowing it’s name to be connected with this result is both surprising and disappointing. Someone dropped the ball at WSJ.