Twitter

BlogAds

Recent Comments

Label Cloud

Pay no attention to the people behind the curtain

Powered By Blogger

Friday, April 23, 2010

Does this mean that Tom Barrett has already won, then?

by folkbum

Via iT, I see that Rasmussen has gotten back around to dipping its polling proboscis into the cheese, and they've offered results on our governor's race:
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state shows both candidates earning 46% of the vote if [Tom] Barrett runs against former Congressman Mark Neumann. Given that match-up, four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided. The other GOP hopeful, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, also attracts 46% against Barrett, while the Democrat draws 44% of the vote. Three percent (3%) prefer another candidate, and seven percent (7%) remain undecided.
This is a poll of a November match-up conducted in April; as such, it's almost worthless anyway, except to tell us that the state's Republicans are likely to vote Republican and the state's Democrats are not. But on all things polling I defer to Nate Silver, such as:
[Rasmussen] is something of an outlier and would reflect a house effect of about 6 points when measuring the net difference between Democratic and Republican preferences. [. . .] Meanwhile, an increasing number of pollsters have begun to publish results among likely voters in their take on the Congressional generic ballot. [. . .] Note that the house effect here, again, is about 6 points.
As much as I do not put great stock in an early poll like this, I do put stock in Silver's comparative assessment of pollsters, which, as you can see, puts Rasmussen about +6 in the R column--which could put Barrett ahead in Wisconsin by a good ten points. Maybe. We'll see what the next slightly less partisan poll shows.

No comments: