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Why are conservative blogs still linking to PPP?

Why are conservative blogs still linking to PPP?

I’ve discussed several times  Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm which heavily spins poll results.

PPP has a split personality; some of its polls are straight up and in actual elections it seems to do as well as many other polling organizations.   But PPP also engages in messaging polls, which help shape the debate.  And on its blog, PPP spins its polling furiously for Democrats.  PPP wants to have it both ways, being neutral professonal pollster and advocate; it’s a tough act to pull off.

It seems that every time I bother to look at the numbers behind a PPP poll, I find that they over sampled Democrats.  While I have not tested a majority of PPP polls, in the times I’ve looked at their numbers I’ve never seen a sampling which reflected party-affiliation reality or which oversampled Republicans.  Maybe I’ve just had bad luck, or maybe there is a problem at PPP.

So it is no surprise that Ed Morrissey at HotAir finds the same problem in a PPP poll purporting to show Obama doing well in Colorado:

“Is Barack Obama in trouble in Colorado?  A new survey from Democratic pollster PPP tries to allay fears that the President has lost significant ground in the interior West state that Democrats worked hard to convert in 2008, but its sample is so skewed that it ends up proving the opposite….  This poll goes beyond bad, into self-parody.”

The cumulative effect of such polling is to create a self-fulfilling prohecy, to rally the troops, to keep Democratic hope alive.

Yet, I continue to see conservative blogs link to PPP polls.  I’ve even done it in the past.

Because PPP is so good at driving news and because it comes out with new polling almost every day, it’s hard to ignore them.  It’s also hard to keep up with them because they literally swarm the news cycle with polling.

So don’t ignore them, just check their sampling … and link to Morrissey’s post every time you do.

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Comments

That issue is why PPP, unlike Rasmussen, never lost its partisan designation in the RealClearPolitics poll summaries.

texaswindchimes | August 12, 2011 at 9:03 am

Out of curiosity I looked at PPP’s site to see how the Wisconsin polls had run. There was nothing on the Home page about Wisconsin but there were at least 4 polling references on how badly Sarah Palin would do against Obama or another candidate, should she choose to run. What make ye all of this little factoid?

Hey, if they can’t have “Hope & Change” why not just let them have hope. Polls that delude pols don’t really help them that much.

My old high-school classmate, now the media columnist for the L.A. Times, sure seems to be skeptical about Rasmussen. Amazing how most of his negative tweets always seem to involve Fox News … and not MSNBC, etc.

Did you see the new Gallup poll giving hope to Democrat congressional candidates, saying they are better positioned to overtake Republicans ? Of 1319 registered voters surveyed, 376 were non-hispanic Blacks.

Gee, I wonder what kind of result you’ll get when you oversample that demographic.

The article says this:
“Bottom Line

The Democratic Party may be better positioned today to win seats in the 2012 congressional elections than it was leading up to the 2010 midterms that resulted in its loss of 63 House seats and majority control. [SNIP] To re-establish a more favorable positioning with voters, the Republican Party will have to deal carefully with the national Tea Party movement. While most Republicans say Tea Party endorsements either make no difference to their vote or increase their likelihood of supporting a candidate, at this point the effect on the all-important independent vote is more negative than positive.”

[…] by John Hitchcock on 2011/08/12 William A Jacobson over at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion is baffled at why Conservative sites would even bother reporting on the findings of PPP. It seems […]

[…] A Jacobson over at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion is baffled at why Conservative sites would even bother reporting on the findings of PPP. It seems […]

[…] A Jacobson over at Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion is baffled at why Conservative sites would even bother reporting on the findings of PPP. It seems […]

Can link to another conservative covering lib sources or give credit without linking.

[…] we would do well to listen to Professor Jacobson: Why are conservative blogs still linking to PPP? PPP has a split personality; some of its polls are straight up and in actual elections it seems to […]