Mitt Romney leads seven percent by unskewed data from Wash. Post/ABC News Poll
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a Victory rally at Holman Stadium on September 7, 2012 in Nashua, New Hampshire.
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Photo by Kayana Szymczak/Getty Images
The latest Washington Post/ABC News pollreleased today shows the race betweenPresident Obama at 49 percent and Mitt Romney at 48 percent. The poll of 826 likely voters, surveyed between September 7-9, has a margin of error of 4 percent. Over-sampling of Democrats by 12 percent, the survey sample included 33 percent Democrats, 23 percent Republicans and 37 percent independent voters.
The sampling of the Washington Post/ABC News poll differs with the partisan data measured from hundreds of thousands of voters by Rasmussen Reports, which measures the partisan percentages at 37.6 percent Republicans, 33.3 percent Democrats and 29.2 percent independents. This indicates a degree of over-sampling of Democrats by eight percent, a plus four margin for Democrats as opposed to the plus four margin of Republicans among the likely voting electorate.
The Washington Post/ABC News poll has Democrats favoring Obama by a 94 percent to six percent margin while Republicans surveyed in the poll favor Romney by a 91 percent to six percent margin. The survey found independent voters to support Romney by a 54 percent to 43 percent edge.
If this data is weighted for the appropriate percentage of independents as shown by the Rasmussen data, the survey indicates a far larger and growing lead for Mitt Romney. Analysis of the data by those criteria would lead to a result showing Romney leading with a 52 percent to 45 percent margin over President Obama. This results in a seven point Romney lead rather than a one point Obama lead. Additionally, rather than showing a race statistically tied, this shows a Romney lead larger than the poll's four percent margin of error.
This survey is not the only such poll recently to be skewed by over-sampling Democrats to skew the results in favor of Barack Obama. Earlier this week, the latest CNN/ORC poll was similarly skewed. Last month on the Fox News segment “Campaign Insiders” today, Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen both confirmed their belief that major polls are skewed in favor of the Democrats by over-sampling of Democratic voters when the surveys are conducted.
The Gallup tracking poll of the presidential race was shown here to also be skewed by over-sampling of Democratic voters. Allegations recently came out that David Alexrod tried to intimidate Gallup into changing their sampling and polling methods. Apparently in reaction to a Gallup poll in April of this year showing Romney leading 48 percent to 43 percent over Obama, Axelrod and others raised issues with Gallup's methodology. At some point later than that, Gallup's surveys have resorted to over-sampling Democrats and producing results more favorable to President Obama.
