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Hillary Trails Republicans

Mike

Well-known member
New poll shows Clinton trails top 2008 Republicans
Mon Nov 26, 2007

powered by SphereWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton trails five top Republican presidential contenders in general election match-ups, a drop in support from this summer, according to a poll released on Monday.

Clinton's top Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and John Edwards, still lead Republicans in hypothetical match-ups ahead of the November 4, 2008, presidential election, the survey by Zogby Interactive showed.

Clinton, a New York senator who has been at the top of the Democratic pack in national polls in the 2008 race, trails Republican candidates Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain and Mike Huckabee by three to five percentage points in the direct matches.

In July, Clinton narrowly led McCain, an Arizona senator, and held a five-point lead over former New York Mayor Giuliani, a six-point lead over former Tennessee Sen. Thompson and a 10-point lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Romney.

She was not matched against the fast-rising Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, in the July poll.

The results come as other national polls show the race for the Democratic nomination tightening five weeks before the first contest in Iowa, which kicks off the state-by-state nomination battles in each party.

Some Democrats have expressed concerns about the former first lady's electability in a race against Republicans. The survey showed Clinton not performing as well as Obama and Edwards among independents and younger voters, pollster John Zogby said.

"The questions about her electability have always been there, but as we get close this suggests that is a problem," Zogby said.

Obama, an Illinois senator, and Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, both hold narrow leads over the Republican contenders in the hypothetical 2008 match-ups.

"It all points to a very competitive general election at a time when many people think the Democrats are going to win the White House," Zogby said.

The poll of 9,355 people had a margin of error of plus or minus one percentage point. The interactive poll surveys individuals who have registered to take part in online polls.

(To read more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at http://blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)

(Reporting by John Whitesides, editing by Vicki Allen)



© Reuters2007All rights reserved
 

passin thru

Well-known member
Betcha that the libs will dispute this poll after falling head over heels on previous polls.
Myself, I never cared for polls but then I am not a lib.
 

Tex

Well-known member
I hate to put it this way, but since Bill is campaigning for her, does that mean he will have access to the oval office? If so, will Monica be invited again?
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
passin thru said:
Betcha that the libs will dispute this poll after falling head over heels on previous polls.
Myself, I never cared for polls but then I am not a lib.

Actually-- In talking with many Democrats and Bush regime disenchanted Republicans- I think many would welcome this...Many of these folks are talking of voting Democrat (mainly because of the past 7 years of Bush/Republican policy) but really don't like Hillary...
So far from the last reported contributions I saw - Montana was donating heaviest to Edwards on the Democrat side-- and Ron Paul on the Republican side (and he had like a 5 to 1 lead in registered Republican caucus supporters :roll: )...But like I've said before-Montana is heavily Libertarian leaning - and many up here often don't always follow the nationwide cultist drumbeats...... :shock: :D :clap:
 
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Anonymous

Guest
Dream on, folks.

Media Lavishes Attention On Bogus Internet Poll Showing Hillary Losing To Repubs -- And Ignores Reputable Poll Finding Opposite
November 27, 2007 -- 11:03 AM EST // //

Ladies and gentlemen, a tale of two polls.

Yesterday two polling firms -- Zogby and Gallup -- released surveys of the presidential race that offered strikingly different conclusions. The Zogby poll found that Hillary is trailing five leading GOP candidates in general election matchups. The Gallup Poll, by contrast, found that Hillary, and to a lesser degree Obama, has a slight to sizable lead over the top GOP contenders.

A couple of other things that distinguish these two polls: The Zogby one is an online poll, a notoriously unreliable method, while the Gallup one is a telephone poll. And, as Charles Franklin of Pollster.com observed yesterday, the Zogby poll is completely out of sync with multiple other national polls finding Hillary with a lead over the GOP candidates. The Zogby poll actually found that Mike Huckabee is leading Hillary in a national matchup. The Gallup findings were in line with most other surveys.
I don't need to tell you which poll got all the media attention. Do I?

The Zogby survey was covered repeatedly on CNN, earned coverage from MSNBC, Fox News, and Reuters and was covered by multiple other smaller outlets.

By contrast, I can't find a single example of any reporter or commentator on the major networks or news outlets referring to the Gallup poll at all, with the lone exception of UPI. While the Zogby poll was mentioned by multiple reporters and pundits, the only mentions the Gallup poll got on TV were from Hillary advisers who had to bring it up themselves on the air in order to inject it into the conversation.

You could argue that the Zogby poll got all the coverage it did precisely because it is out of sync with multiple other polls, and thus is news. But the truth is that the reporters and editors at the major nets know full well that the Zogby poll is bunk -- yet they breathlessly covered it anyway.

Worse, the Zogby poll was covered with few mentions either of its dubious methodology or of the degree to which its findings don't jibe with other surveys. Bottom line: The Zogby poll was considered big news because many in the political press are heavily invested in the Hillary-is-unelectable narrative for all kinds of reasons that have little to do with a desire to, you know, practice journalism.
 
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Anonymous

Guest
A new Gallup Poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton with a slim but not statistically significant advantage over both former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain in head-to-head matchups for the 2008 general election for president. Clinton has much more substantial leads over former Sen. Fred Thompson and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Sen. Barack Obama also has significant leads over Thompson and Romney, but essentially ties with Giuliani and McCain

For the full report go to the Gallup site:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/102862/Democratic-Candidates-Look-Good-Latest-2008-Trial-Heats.aspx

From Pollster.com regarding the Zogby poll:

We can probably rule out one easy explanation: That Clinton has suddenly collapsed and Zogby is just the first to find it. The reason is internal to the Zogby result. If Clinton really has suddenly become 10 points less attractive, we'd expect all four Republicans paired against her to do BETTER than their trend estimates when facing her. But what happens is Clinton goes down and they don't do any better. That is hard to reconcile with a real change in Clinton's support. (A tortured version would say Clinton must have collapsed among Dems who now say they are undecided while refusing to move towards any of the Republicans. But that isn't usually what happens in real data when one candidate declines sharply. Usually the other moves up at least a bit, drawing not only from unhappy partisans but especially from independents who now are disenchanted with the former front-runner. So while you could make the math work with this story, it doesn't seem very well supported by the data.)

The Zogby Internet polling has a questionable track record in statewide races for Senate and Governor in 2006, where they often far over-estimated the competitiveness of races compared to conventional phone polls taken at the same time. One way to make sense of those problems turns out not to help much here. It is reasonable that the people who volunteer to take political polls over the internet are considerably more interested in politics (and likely more strongly partisan) than is a random sample of likely voters. That should be expected to lead to fewer people with "don't know" responses as better informed and more partisan respondents are likely to both know more about the candidates and to have made up their minds sooner than a proper random sample. That helps explain why Zogby's 2006 internet polls looked as they did.

But this does no good in Clinton's case. What we see is that MORE internet respondents are undecided about their vote between Clinton and four Republicans than the trend estimates based on less involved and partisan phone samples show. The Zogby undecided rates for the Clinton pairings are 20, 17, 17 and 16% (plus 17% undecided in the Huckabee comparison.) The comparable undecided rates based on the trend estimates are 8.2, 12.8, 9.0 and 10.6. That is an average undecided rate of 17.5 in Zogby vs 10.15 in the trends. Likewise the undecided rate is slightly lower for Obama pairings than it is for Clinton: 17, 13, 14, 13, and 14 for Huckabee. How could it be that a sample that is almost certainly more involved, knowledgeable and partisan can be LESS decided about Cinton, the single best known figure in the race? Again, a tortured story might be constructed, but I think a simpler explanation is that this result is not consistent within the Zogby data itself, or in comparison with outside polling.

Where does this leave us? Puzzled. If these results came from voting machines, I'd suspect that something in the ballot design or the recording mechanism caused a modest but consistent undercount of the Clinton support. The effect seems confined only to that one candidate, and not to any others, Democrats or Republicans. And there was no boost in support for the Republicans paired against Clinton. In this case, I'm similarly inclined to wonder if there is the possibility that the Zogby online survey had a glitch that caused a systematic "undervote" for Clinton. Certainly if my research assistant brought me these results, I'd want to check the software for mistakes before I published it.

Let's assume the Zogby organization has checked for any such possible mistakes or glitches and has ruled that out. (One would assume they were as surprised by the data as anyone and since their reputation is on the line, would have checked very carefully before releasing the data.) Is there any reasonable model of how candidate preferences are evolving that might explain this result, and the stability of Republicans paired against Clinton AND the stability of Obama support and that of his Republican pairings?

Without access to the raw data it is impossible to test any speculation here. But here is one possibility: Internet polls, presumably including Zogby's, use weighting to adjust for non-representativeness in their volunteer respondents. (There is a huge debate about whether this, and more sophisticated approaches, can produce generalizable population estimates with good statistical properties, but we'll leave that for another day.) Clinton has more support among women and somewhat older people. Both those groups are likely to be underrepresented in any pool of internet respondents. As a result the responses of those with these characteristics who ARE present in the sample are likely to be weighted up quite a bit to reach population proportions in the weighted sample. If the relatively few older women who are in the sample are ALSO atypical in other ways that both make them volunteer for internet surveys AND be less disposed to support Clinton than are non-internet volunteering older women, then weighting these respondents up won't properly capture Clinton's support and will lead to a systematic underestimate of her support.

That could do it, but it sounds pretty tortured to me.

I'd check the software one more time.

And based on the large outliers the Clinton results produce, I'd hold off on the Reuters headline until I saw some confirmation from other polls.
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