Exciting 1% shift!

Brendan Nyhan offers this amusing example of a newspaper hyping poll noise. From the LA Times:

Registered voters who watched the debate preferred Obama, 49% to 44%, according to the poll taken over three days after the showdown in Oxford, Miss.

That is a small gain from a week ago, when a survey of the same voters showed the Democratic candidate with a 48% to 45% edge.

A small gain, indeed.

2 thoughts on “Exciting 1% shift!

  1. It would have been more informative to release numbers on how many people moved from each position to each other position, since the sample was fixed. I couldn't find the sample size on the web site, so let's say that it was 500 people. Then originally there would be 240 Obama supporters and 225 McCain supporters, with 35 undecided; afterwards, it would be 245 to 220 with 35 undecided.

    If you have 5 McCain supporters moving to undecided and 5 undecideds moving to Obama, that would sound pretty good for Obama — 5/35 compared to 0/35 ain't bad at all.

    On the other hand, if you have 15 McCain supporters moving to undecided, 50 McCain supporters moving to Obama, 37 Obama supporters moving to McCain, 10 Obama supporters moving to undecided, 28 undecideds moving to McCain, and 2 undecideds moving to Obama… then you have a noisy mess. (I think this works out right).

  2. Let's do the time warp again.

    the poll taken over three days after the showdown in Oxford, Miss.

    The debate ended around 10:30 p.m. EST. on Friday, Sept. 26. Three days after that would be the evening of Monday Sept. 29. The LA Times story is dated Sept. 29 but was obviously written and posted on the 28th.

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