{"id":3061,"date":"2010-10-23T00:10:07","date_gmt":"2010-10-23T04:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=3061"},"modified":"2010-10-25T08:26:23","modified_gmt":"2010-10-25T12:26:23","slug":"what-do-the-polls-really-say-about-the-ny-23-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/10\/23\/what-do-the-polls-really-say-about-the-ny-23-race\/","title":{"rendered":"What do the polls really say about the NY-23 race?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite polling websites is Pollster.com, the site acquired recently by Huffingtonpost.\u00a0 Scanning their data on Friday, I stumbled across an interesting &#8212; and sketchy &#8212; bit of information.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/elections\/house\">Pollster lists NY-23 as leaning Republican<\/a>, suggesting that challenger Matt Doheny has a clear edge over Democratic incumbent Bill Owens.<\/p>\n<p>Digging deeper, I found that the site claims that the &#8220;latest poll&#8221; gives Doheny a 46-39% edge in the race and claims that he&#8217;s very nearly a lock, with an 85% chance of winning.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble is, so far as I can tell, that number is based on older surveys conducted by Republican pollsters.\u00a0 (<a href=\"http:\/\/upstatepoliticalreport.blogspot.com\/2010\/10\/nrcc-poll-for-ny-23-dohenyowens-matt.html\">One such poll <\/a>gave Doheny a 51-37% advantage.)<\/p>\n<p>The latest poll of the race that I can find &#8212; and certainly the most recent survey conducted independently &#8212; was Siena&#8217;s survey released October 13th.<\/p>\n<p>They found that Owens was leading by 5%.<\/p>\n<p>And when Siena factored in the lingering Doug Hoffman effect (a significant number of voters weren&#8217;t aware that the Conservative had dropped out of the race) Owens&#8217; lead climbed to 11%.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a huge swing, from Siena&#8217;s 5-point lead for Owens to Pollster&#8217;s 7-point lead for Doheny.\u00a0 So what gives?<\/p>\n<p>I really don&#8217;t have an answer.\u00a0 There has been a lot of fresh skepticism lately about polling methodology, the influence of partisan polls, etc.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, I suspect that the outcome of this race will be very, very close.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite polling websites is Pollster.com, the site acquired recently by Huffingtonpost.\u00a0 Scanning [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}