Monday · August 23 2004
The Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 site now has a syndicated feed. They may have had one for awhile, but I noticed just today. Follow the daily red state/blue state polls in Bloglines or whatever feed reader you prefer.
how is California barely Kerry???? I don't understand...i thought he had this state hands down- has something turned that I was unaware of??
I paged back to the August 20 date when the new CA data was posted:
A very strange Survey USA poll puts Bush within 3% of Kerry in California, 49% to 46%. I don't believe that for a second. Remember that polls are always reported with a margin of error (MoE). For state polls, it is nearly always 3.5% to 4%, so we don't report it. What this means is that if you repeat the poll over and over, 95% of the time the difference between the true (unknown) mean and the measured mean will be no more than the MoE. A consequence of this is that 5% of the time, the measured mean will be off by more than the MoE. I don't know if this is the case here, but the data are very suspect. There is no reason to think Survey USA is cheating here. This may just be a statistical outlier.