Because I strongly disagree with the sampling process used by Newsweek in their Presidential polling (polling a split of Republicans and Democrats with no bearing to what exists in the country) I put absolutely no faith in their top line “McCain vs. Obama” number. It means nothing to me that Obama dropped 12 points in three weeks, from a 15 point lead to a 3 point lead, within the margin of error.  It is, admittedly, amusing to watch the libs melt down over it, though.

Newsweek polls until they get a certain number of respondents, hoping that the split between Republicans, Democrats and Independents will magically just work out.  Then they weight it after the fact. That’s never going to produce accurate top line results.  It will produce news with wild fluctuations, though, which is what they’re going for.

My problems with their sampling methods do not extend to the internals, though.  It doesn’t matter at that point. The Republican numbers really do represent Republican attitudes and the Democrat numbers really do represent Democrat attitudes. At that point, the split doesn’t matter because there is no split.

That’s why I was amused by this paragraph at Hot Air, reporting that Obama has dropped an amazing 14 points among Independent voters, and is now trailing McCain by 12 points in this important group.

But there is a definite momentum away from Obama, especially within the independents.  June’s poll, taken only three weeks ago, had Obama ahead by 12 points, 48-36.   Obama has lost a whopping 14 points among independents and now trails McCain, 34-41.  “Undecided/Other” rose among independents from 16% in June to 25% in July, which likely shows flirtation with third-party candidates such as Ralph Nader and Bob Barr — but some went to McCain as well.

Then there’s this.

Update: A reader points out that the last page of the polling data shows a R/D/I split of 28/35/33, which doesn’t match the raw sample numbers.  The report states that Newsweek weighted the data in accordance with demographic information from the Census Bureau.  If they weighted the sample to this degree, then Obama’s in much bigger trouble than I first thought.

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Tagged

Barack Hussein Obama, John McCain, Newsweek