[Marxism] An instructive poll from the NY Times

[Joaquin Bustelo]

The New York Times web site has a poll that is very instructive, because it
tells us a great deal about how good these polls are.

The poll was of 671 persons, 601 of whom claimed to be registered, and 283
of which claim to have voted or say they will vote in the Democratic Party
primaries.

The Voting Age Population, 18 or over, of the United States is about 225
million. That figure is based on the nearly 216 million in the VAP in 2004,
to which should be added 9-12 million to account for 2004-2008 population
growth (this on the basis of the increase between 1996 and 2000, and 2000
and 2004). A minority is institutionalized and considered unavailable for
voting -- whether too sick, in prison, abroad with the armed forces and so
on, and at any rate unrepresented in a phone survey of this kind. For our
back of the envelope calculations, we'll say that's equal to the number in
the increase, and so leave the VAP at 215 million.

Now 283 of 671 is 42% and change. And that number times 215 million is
90,678,000.

For the Republicans, that's 22%+ of the VAP, or 47,420,000.

So 138 million is the number of people who, according to the poll, will have
voted in the primaries.

Now, the TOTAL vote for Clinton and Obama, including all primaries
(including the ones ruled illegal) and estimated vote in caucus states is
about 30,700,000. Edwards and the rest might add another couple of million
votes, let's say 2.3 million to make the total 33 million. And optimistic
projections of the Democrat turnout in the remaining primaries are five
million votes. 

That's 38 million voters. The 38 million is actually an extraordinarily HIGH
turnout for primaries, nearly 18% of the VAP for the Democrats and adding a
generous one-third more for the Republicans, 24%, more than 50 million.

Still on the Democrat side that leaves 53 million Democrat voters Missing In
Action, and at least 20 or 30 million more on the Republican side.

Or to put it another way. EITHER the New York Times survey was outrageously
biased in its sampling so as to over-represent actual voters better than
2-1, OR the MAJORITY of those who responded to the poll were lying.

That the poll bears no relation to U.S. electoral reality is obvious from
the top line figure of nearly 140 million total voters. That's tens of
millions more than have EVER voted in a general election. And probably
around three times the number that actually are voting in the primaries.

Now the New York Times has clever people and statisticians on its staff as
does its polling organization. They could have done the simple math I did
above and come up with the conclusion I've come to, which is that either the
sampling was completely gonzo or the responses mostly lies. In EITHER case,
you'd think or honest, truth-telling journalists and their pollsters, a not
entirely insignificant fact to note when presenting the poll to the public.

The NYT's front-page write-up of the poll is here:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/us/politics/05poll.html?hp>.

It doesn't even MENTION the question about whether people had voted or were
planning to, never mind HONESTLY presenting to their readers the obvious
conclusion. You'd have to scrounge around their web site to find the FULL
poll results and run the numbers yourself to get a picture of the "accuracy"
of the poll.

Joaquin