POLL ANALYST FIGHT!
Monday, February 9th, 2009
In the months leading up to the presidential election, the single most important time of the day, every day, was late in the afternoon, when Nate Silver’s “Today’s Polls, dd/mm” from FiveThirtyEight would appear in America’s Google Readers. Nothing excited liberals more than seeing a new SurveyUSA poll showing Obama +7 in Virginia, for example, precisely because Silver told us all that SurveyUSA was a good pollster. But you know who else was good, and got less credit, was Mark Blumenthal over there at Pollster.com. Poor underappreciated Mark Blumenthal! He used fancy regressions on his poll averages too, you know!? Well we haven’t looked at either of these sites since November 5, but this random Andrew Sullivan post tells us that Silver and Blumenthal are still doing poll analysis — and they’re reaching shockingly different conclusions. MORE »
Even as he mounts his defense against critics who have adorable concerns over civil liberties in the light of the news of Executive Branch-sanctioned spying on Americans, President Bush can take comfort in a recent upward bounce in his approval rating. Well…that is, he COULD take comfort in the polls, but, of course, we know that he never looks at polls ever no way forever. 