Bush behind swiftvet ads - poll goes from 42% to 50% - a question

[alcuno]

The number went from 42% to 50% in three days. The interesting thing about this article is that it says 46% of Americans think the * campaign is behind it. Where do they get the 46% from? Averaging percents? 42% + 50% = 92 divided by 2 = 46%. I know it's minutia but I'm a math person and I like numbers to make sense.

Isn't the % of people who think * is behind it 50% not 46%?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040828/ap_on_el_pr/kerry_vietnam_opinion


"In polling from Monday through Thursday, 46 percent said they believed the Bush campaign was behind the ads and 37 percent said they thought the ads were done independently.

The president and his campaign staff have said repeatedly they have no connection to the ads, which have come under increasing criticism as Navy records and additional witnesses backed Kerry's version of events.

On Monday and Tuesday when the Kerry campaign was making the accusation Bush was involved, 42 percent said the Bush campaign was behind them and 41 percent said they were truly independent.

After Ginsberg resigned from the campaign on Wednesday, 50 percent said in polling the next two nights that the Bush campaign was connected to the ads and 34 percent said it was not."

[Fovea]

1. one poll the other day

reported 56% blame Bush.

[unblock]

2. this is neither uncommon, nor unreasonable

it's fairly normal to conduct polls over the course of 3-4 days and average the results.

of course, this does introduce the problem you point out, which is that they're then measuring a moving target; perception on day one is not perception on day four.

however, insisting that the entire poll be conducted on the same day is impractical, and worse, introduces a problem for the polled people who can't be reached on the first day. if you can't reach some percentage of your sample, then you run the risk of skewing your results, as the responses from active people might differ from the responses from the stay-at-homes who are easier to reach. hence you need to give them several days to ensure a greater likelihood of actually reaching your sample.

[King of New Orleans]

3. They considered it a 4 day poll

not a tracking poll. They did correctly note that the % of people that thought Bush was behind the ad jumped after the Ginsberg resignation. But the four day average was 46%. It's fairly responsible reporting of the poll data.

[ochazuke]

4. Kerry and friends can't let up on this smear yet

Yeah, I know, people are sick of it, but if the Kerry counteroffensive ends too soon, older voters will forget that they found out that Kerry was in truth a war hero. They will forget that the swift boat smear veterans were lying.

They will remember the first (and therefore stronger) impression: Kerry seems to be untrustworthy.

I say older voters, but others who aren't paying close attention will fall prey to the same tendency.

[Davis_X_Machina]

5. It's depressing to contemplate...

...but there are probably tens of millions of Americans who probably don't consider the link to Bush a problem.

These are the voters who are devotees of the cult of 'toughness', the same people who claimed that Bush stealing Florida was a good thing, that it proved he was worthy of the presidency, because he had the balls to do it.

In all probability this testosterone-addled cohort of voters wasn't voting for Kerry anyways -- he can't point to a record of starting wars on a whim.