Monday, May 19, 2008

Notes on our Oregon poll

-As several folks have noted, our Presidential numbers showed Hillary Clinton leading 50-32 among black voters. Of course that's goofy, but it wasn't a miscalculation. Keep in mind that there were a grand total of 26 black voters in our sample. That means a margin of error of +/- 19.2% for that particular crosstab. So I wouldn't make too much of it.

-Other folks have suggested that all weekend polling is likely to have been thrown off by the remarkably well attended Obama rally in Portland yesterday. While weekend polling always has its pitfalls, we called through our entire sample at 11 AM, 3 PM, and 7 PM Saturday and then again at 2 PM, 4 PM, and 7 PM Sunday. I imagine that most anyone who was willing to answer the survey was home at one of those times.

-Our data is almost always better than my intuition, but even though we show Obama up by a lot more than any other polling that came out today, I think it's actually more likely that Obama's winning margin will exceed what we're showing than be less than it. PPP has only underestimated Obama twice the whole cycle- in Ohio where we had him doing one point too well, and of course the Pennsylvania disaster.

We'll see tomorrow!

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