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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Politics A Correction

Posted by Christopher Frizzelle on Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 2:15 PM

In a profile this week of underdog candidate for mayor Mike McGinn, I referred to two Survey USA polls about the mayor's race.

[A McGinn volunteer] says, "Nobody's polling. Nobody's polling this race. So no one knows what's going on." He points out that the two SurveyUSA polls didn't focus on primary voters: Both surveys polled just over a thousand adults in the Seattle area, in both polls only about 500 respondents were determined to be likely primary voters, and in both polls more than 100 respondents weren't even registered to vote.

It's not true that the SurveyUSA polls (here and here) didn't focus on primary voters. I completely misread the fine print on the polls, which states (to quote one of them—they're both the same except for the figures):

SurveyUSA interviewed 1,050 adults from the city of Seattle 06/22/09 through 06/24/09. Of them, 943 identified themselves as being registered to vote. Of the registered voters, 505 were determined by SurveyUSA to be likely to vote in the primary. The election will be conducted entirely by mail; ballots begin to be mailed on July 29...

But the results of the polls don't reflect the answers of everyone interviewed. They only reflect the answers given by likely primary voters. We regret the error, and are updating the piece online to reflect this.

Comments (1) RSS

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"Likely voters" is poll code for "really old bitter people who vote and complain all the time".

Which might have made sense pre-2008, but in today's everyone-votes-by-mail universe, not so much.

Posted by Will in Seattle