Eye Of The Pollster

Much is being made by the wingers about this Zogby poll that shows Obama's approval rating falling to the 50% mark. They're lining up to declare Obama's term over after two months.

Only one problem for the wingers, who are already celebrating "the end of Obama's mandate". FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver kills any credibility the Zogby internet poll has.

Let me qualify this a bit: Zogby International conducts two types of polls. One type are conventional telephone polls. Zogby's telephone polls, while prone to somewhat wild fluctuations and subject to their share of erratic results (such as predicting a 13-point win for Barack Obama in the California primary; Obama lost by 9 points), are actually not terrible, and did fairly well on November 4th.

Zogby, however, also conducts Internet-based polls. These polls are conducted among users who volunteer to participate in them, first by signing up at the Zogby website (you can do so yourself here) and then by responding to an e-mail solicitation. These Internet polls, to the extent they rely on voluntary participation, violate the most basic precept of survey research, which is that of the random sample. And as you might infer, they obtain absolutely terrible results.

Messing with Nate Silver on poll numbers is like going up against Kroog on economics or the Sadly, No! crew on snark: you're going to lose.

All told, between 48 contests that he's surveyed over the past two election cycles, Zogby's Internet polls have been off by an average of 7.6 points. This is an extreme outlier with respect to absolutely anyone else in the polling community.

These Internet polls, simply put, are not scientific and should not be published by any legitimate news organization, at least not without an asterisk the size of an Alex Rodriguez steroidal syringe. But I'll bet you that Matt Drudge already has the siren cued up by now.

So the wingers are desperately clinging to the one badly erroneous outlier poll that's so far off the mark with its dubious methods that it only ends up proving just how silly they all are on a regular basis.

But it sells copy, doesn't it? And so the Village Idiots chuckle and pat us rubes on the head.