NY Times Bashes Palin With Skewed Poll

The NY Times, a failing company grasping at the straw of relevance, put a week-old poll on the front page today, trying to claim that Sarah Palin was a "drag" on the McCain ticket.

Mrs. Palin will do well to remember this in January when she presides over the Senate.

The poll shows that Sarah is not popular among people who love Barack Obama. It was not Sarah Palin's job to appeal to those folks, but to the Republican base. She does that, because without the negative lens of wanting to elect Obama, people see she's made of awesome.

Rather than showing that Sarah Palin is a drag on the ticket, what their poll really shows is that a week ago people thought Barack Obama was going to win the election.

Here is how the poll was conducted, and also a PDF of the entire results.

We note that the poll was conducted as a random selection of telephone exchanges, weighted by population. In other words, urban areas favoring Barack Obama were more likely to be called.

Then there is this:

The combined results have been weighted to adjust for variation in the sample relating to geographic region, sex, race, marital status, age and education. In addition, the land-line respondents were weighted to take account of household size and number of telephone lines into the residence, while the cellphone respondents were weighted according to whether they were reachable only by cellphone or also by land line.

Some findings regarding voting were also weighted in terms of an overall “probable electorate,” which uses responses to questions dealing with voting history, attention to the campaign and likelihood of voting in 2008 as a measure of the probability of respondents’ turning out in November.

When they noticed that even considering the inherent bias in their questioning that their randomness wasn't random enough, they skewed the results to more closely fit what they believed.

(This post was revised. I thought at first that the NY Times poll didn't even ask about Sarah Palin, but I was wrong.)

Sphere: Related Content