Daily Kos Elections Polling Wrap: Is there an active effort to minimize the Obama convention bounce?

[ProSense]

Daily Kos Elections Polling Wrap: Is there an active effort to minimize the Obama convention bounce?

by Steve Singiser

<...>

On today, the Tuesday after the DNC, Gallup issued their "official" statement about their convention bounce. The banner headline atop their website read, curiously, as follows: "Obama Gets Three-Point Convention Bounce."

Regular readers of the Wrap would find that to be strange. After all, at the dawn of the gathering in Charlotte last week, the president led by a margin of a single point (47-46). Today, that margin sits at six points (50-44). That would seem like a five-point bounce. But what Gallup did, to reach their calculation, was to simply measure the change in Obama's support (from 47 percent to 50 percent), rather than the change in margin between Obama and Romney.

The problem there is twofold. For one thing, on a basic level, is the fact that given the outsized polling window utilized by Gallup, the Obama bounce may not necessarily be done. Today's sample was based on polls from Tuesday through Monday. Ergo, over 40% of the respondents came before Obama's convention speech, and over a quarter had not seen Bill Clinton's speech. The second problem is that the "three-point bounce" has been repeated, including in media outlets that have calculated the bounce previously by the difference in the margin. So, the net effect is to make the Gallup bounce seem smaller than it really is.

But that pales in comparison to what ABC/Washington Post did in the reporting of their poll. Check this out:

HEADLINE: "Among likely voters, Obama-Romney close"

Last week’s Democratic National Convention helped President Obama improve his standing against Republican Mitt Romney, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, but did little to reduce voter concern about his handling of the economy.

The survey shows that the race remains close among likely voters, with Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions.

But among a wider sample of all registered voters, Obama holds an apparent edge, topping Romney at 50 percent to 44 percent, and has clear advantages on important issues in the campaign when compared with his rival.

The grievous act of malpractice there? The poll taken "just before the conventions" was based on a sample of registered voters, not likely voters. Right in the lede, WaPo makes an apples-to-oranges comparison to create a very false equivalence between the two polls.

The reality of the situation, of course, is dramatically different. President Obama, on the margin, is polling seven points stronger now against Mitt Romney than he did in the pre-convention poll among registered voters. And that is quite the statement: it is not saying that Barack Obama got a lofty seven-point bounce. It is bigger than that: it is saying that the Obama DNC bounce was seven points larger than Romney's RNC bounce, because it clearly more than offset any bump Romney received during his confab in Tampa.

But, if you read the WaPo writeup, it seems like the conventions barely moved the needle. That is a blatant misrepresentation of the actual data, and it would be hard to deny liberal conspiracy theories that a major media outlet is actively trying to distort their own data to create the impression of a stubborn tossup unchanged by the convention season. Shame on them for that.

- more -

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/11/1130129/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Polling-Wrap-Is-there-an-active-effort-to-minimize-the-Obama-convention-bounce

WaPo article: forget Bain, it's only "hurting Romney among a significant number of voters"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021321448






Note:

Kos Media, LLC Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified

[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[DonCoquixote]

2. is water wet?

The MSM does nto want Obama running away with this race at all,because they want those billions the Koches will shovel into their maws.

[MFM008]

3. yes

they have to drag it back to "EVEN"/ tied or they wont have anything to talk about to November. Funny how WAPO came out with a poll just at the peak of the Obama bounce with another "TIED" poll isnt it.

[Cha]

4. Of course, it's the era of the

Narrative "News" Outlets. They drive the narrative to meet their agenda whether it's true or not.

[LiberalAndProud]

5. Aren't close polls more likely to get voters to the booth?

I'm not unhappy that people might worry that Obama isn't going to walk away with this election. On the other hand, it might shore up flagging confidence for Romney voters, but I can't think that this would be a measurable outcome.

We can read and interpret the numbers for ourselves. If the narrative does make a difference, it seems like it serves our purposes. What am I missing?

[ProSense]

6. Distorting information is not their job.

It's bad enough that polls can be manipulated, but distorting the results by ignoring the data and omitting information is disgusting.