« Wall Street Journal Article Asks All the Right Questions |
Main
| New State Polls »
September 20, 2004
A Few More Thoughts on the New CBS News/New York Times Poll
As Chris Bowers of MyDD points out in his insightful new essay, "Rapid Poll Movement is a General Election Myth", the new CBS/NYT poll is actually a lot worse for Bush than the CBS News poll released a week earlier, even though both polls gave Bush a 50-42 lead among RVs. That's because, since the current poll is substantially more Republican than the earlier poll (which actually had a slight Democratic edge), Bush should actually have performed better than the earlier poll on the horse race and on indicators like job approval and right/direction wrong track in this poll, instead of about the same. That also means that if we adjust the current poll to correct the apparent surplus of Republicans, Bush's performance on these indicators should actually decline below the measurements of the earlier poll.
Since CBS News thoughtfully provides the overall result and the result broken down by party ID for each and every question in their survey, it is possible to estimate what Bush's ratings would have looked like if there weren't so many Republicans in the sample. Here are some examples, based on reweighting the current poll to the 2000 exit poll distribution of partisanship:
Overall job approval: 49 percent approval/44 percent disapproval
Economic job approval: 42/52
Iraq job approval: 45/51
Campaign against terrorism job approval: 57/37
Right direction/wrong track: 40/53
In every case, these ratings are worse than they were a week ago, making the idea that the race is tightening up more plausible.
Of course, Kerry needs not just a tight race, but to pull ahead. Given Bush's continued vulnerabilities, which these data highlight, Kerry's got the opening to do so. I'll address this issue in future posts.
Posted by Ruy Teixeira at 01:13 AM | link
|
