SMRs and AMRs

Monday, October 08, 2012

Taking apart the polls

Oct. 7: National Polls Show Signs of Settling 

By NATE SILVER, NYT

Mitt Romney remains in a considerably stronger polling position than he was before last Wednesday’s debate in Denver. But the polls released on Sunday did not tell quite as optimistic a story for him as those in the debate’s immediate aftermath.

The four national tracking polls as published on Sunday were largely unchanged from their Saturday releases. Mr. Romney maintained a 2-point lead in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, but President Obama’s lead held at 2 points in an online poll published by Ipsos and at 3 points in the Gallup tracking poll. In the RAND Corporation’s online tracking poll, which lists its results to the decimal place, Mr. Obama’s lead declined incrementally, to 3.9 percentage points from 4.4 on Saturday.

Only the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll consists of interviews that were conducted entirely after the debate, but the share of post-debate interviews is now large enough in the other polls that we can start to come to some inferences about the overall magnitude of Mr. Romney’s bounce.

My effort to do that is reflected in the chart below. I’ve compared the most recent reading in each poll to the average result that the poll showed in the period between the Democratic convention and the Denver debate. I’ve also listed the approximate share of interviews in each poll that post-dated the debate.

(More here.)

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