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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Fox News Poll changes method to improve McCain’s results

Fox News is out with a new poll that shows the race tightening:

Obama 47

McCain 44

All of you need to understand that the tightening in this poll does not result from a change in the voting populace.  Ambinder points out a reader wrote him with this observation:

Fox News changed its sampling. Last week – D43, R 37 This week – D41, R39 http://courses.ttu.edu/hdfs339… There is no good reason to change the weighting, they just did it and not surprisingly came out with a more favorable result for McCain.

Ambinder queried Mark Blumenthal at pollster.com and got this response:

If they have been weighting by party, and they suddenly changed their weighting, I’d say it’s a pretty questionable practice.  The last four Fox surveys all varied slightly in terms of party ID, so I’m not sure that’s what they’ve done.  That said, if the other surveys this week show no similar “shift” in party, then it’s probably reasonable to discount this result.


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