Several weeks ago, Newsweek had Obama up by 15 points. Compared to other polls, it seemed way off based. As expected, the next Newsweek poll shows a much tighter race at 3 points, which is more consistent with other national polls. Of couse, Newsweek wonders what happened over the last several weeks. This fits into their narrative that Obama’s appeal might be fading.
They might want to take a look at the methodology of their poll. The weighting between Democrats and Republicans over the two polls were very different, along with weighting for other democgraphic factors. Naturally, if you include more Republicans in the second poll, you will show a much different margin.
This is a tough year to conduct polls, as the breakdown between Democrats and Republicans is very hard to predict. That breakdown has a huge impact on polling results.
What’s strange is that Newsweek would release polls with very different weightings and then draw conclusions from the poll that don’t take these weightings into account. This is another example where blogs do a much better job of reporting facts than the mainstream media.
