I've said it before and I'll say it again: political polls taken over the weekend are useless! The recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll that everyone's talking about -- showing President Bush surging against John Kerry -- almost certainly underestimates the President's popularity. Why? Because it was taken Friday through Sunday and more Democrats stay at home during the weekend than Republicans.
So I called one of my old polling friends, Republican Ed Goeas, who worked with me years ago in Christine Todd Whitman's tax-cutting 1993 gubernatorial victory in New Jersey. Along with Democrat Celinda Lake, Goeas publishes the highly-regarded Battleground Survey. He told me to be careful about reading the polls. For one thing, it really matters if polls are conducted during the week or over the weekend. He told me that "political pollsters don't poll on the weekends. They prefer Sunday night through Thursday night. Weekend results are just not reflective of where a given race really is."Goeas explained that more Democrats are found at home on the weekends, especially blue-collar Democrats. He added that "anyone who spends 20 to 30 minutes during the weekend talking to some pollster is not normal."
Good point. Of course, the poll has another, more fundamental problem that makes it even more useless: it was conducted in March, and the election is in November.
This is exactly the sort of thing I was telling my 6th graders as part of our unit on statistics. I'm printing it out and reading it to them today.
X: Well sure, but conducting a better poll during the week would at least tell us what people think now. Unless you've got a time machine, you're proposing to put pollsters out of business! (Heh.)
WH: Cool! I work with 6th graders, say hi for me.