Discussion for article #245069
Sanders is like a shot of adrenaline to the dying heart of America. Will the truth save us? Or will we sleep walk into corporate fascism?
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We’re already there.
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I looked at the internals of this poll. The internals said that only 50% of the Democratic respondents would vote again for Barak Obama, if he could constitutionally run again. This, in spite of the fact that every other poll has shown Obama enormously popular among Democrats countrywide. I think those numbers are regularly in the high 80s. Could it possibly be that in New Hampshire, that Barak Obama carried twice, only 50% of Democrats would vote for Obama again. Pardon me if I think that is unlikely in the extreme. Much more likely is that this poll got a pretty strange voter pool-- deliberately, I suspect not, but through unprofessionalism, most likely. Most surprisingly, the the “internals essay” showed no recognition of this incongruity. How about quizzing these pollsters about their techniques.
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Pollsters don’t change their techniques until forced to. This is why FiveThirtyEight is such a godsend for determining what polls are good or not. Their weighted polling average has Sanders 52.8%, Clinton 39.4%, Better than a 13 point spread.
Always makes sense to be skeptical of any one poll. But in this case every major poll this month except one (PPP) has showed Bernie ahead to one degree or another in New Hampshire. Whether his margin is as high as 16% (or even higher as several polls suggest) I am somewhat skeptical. That being said, it’s New Hampshire, and right next to Vermont where Bernie’s wildly popular, so it’s not out of the question.
But in any event, it’s not nearly as important as yesterday’s poll that appeared to show Bernie significantly narrowing Hillary’s lead in South Carolina. But that one is in fact just one poll, and with a very large margin of error (9.4 points!). So, we’ll have to see what develops when we get at least a few more polls to support or contradict that apparent trend.
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Thanks. I absolutely agree with you as to any single poll, but I am most skeptical of those that share little or none of their methodology (like this one) and then ask the reader to believe totally incongruous findings. It would certainly come as a surprise if Sanders didn’t win New Hampshire. But I think if I were running a New Hampshire poll that came up with a sample of Democrats who only had 50% support of Obama, I would ask some hard questions before I put the poll out to the public.
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Well I did the ISideWith quiz and came out Sanders 95% and Clinton 92%. No surprise at all there. But then The Rump scored 55% as the top Republican, so now I’m questioning the validity of the online quiz, as well. But who knows what the Rump believes anyway, he might well pull a Romney when this is over and re-reinvent himself yet a third time.
Look, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had the charisma to fire enough people up, and turn enough voters out on election night to make the difference. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton didn’t. I’m waiting to see if either candidate develops it before they come to ask for my vote in Wisconsin. So I guess I’ll make up my mind at the last minute.
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I agree, that does seem pretty out of whack. I don’t know if or how much of a factor this might be, but Independents can vote in the Democratic primary in NH, so if a fair number of Independents were included in a sample of “likely Democratic primary voters” that might account for some of the difference. Still, 50% sounds low.
good points, but I’m sure some percentage of full throughted supporters would drop off. merely for the sake of change.
I’d expect for multiple reasons this would be higher than normal, (record gridlock regardless of fault etc) this time around.
for me, I wouldn’t want a 3rd term for him simply to give the poor man break. I’ll be relieved for him and his family.
it’s easy to give a wacky answer when you know the hypothetical can’t happen.
for all these reasons, I don’t see these odd factoids as a signifigant.
As Poopypants noted, it is also inline with other recent polls
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