Pity CBS and the New York Times. They can see the Republican tidal wave coming, but their liberal bias is so strong that they can’t bring themselves to admit the size of what they see.
Take the results of the latest CBS/New York Times poll, for example:
With the midterm elections less than a week away, a new CBS News/New York Times poll finds that Republicans continue to hold an advantage over Democrats in the generic House ballot. Forty-six percent of likely voters say they plan to vote Republican, while 40 percent say they will vote Democrat.
Americans are divided in their views of the job President Obama is doing: 45% approve, while 47% disapprove.
If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the poll, however, you’ll find the following paragraph:
This poll was conducted among a random sample of 1,173 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone October 22-26, 2010. An oversample of African Americans was interviewed, for a total of 273 interviews with African Americans.
What this means is that CBS and the New York Times have stacked the deck in this poll two different ways. And both of them lessen the impact of the aforementioned tidal wave.
First, they oversampled blacks, who are not just predominantly Democrat, but overwhelmingly Democrat. Blacks are approximately 13% of the population, yet in this poll they account for 23% of the respondents.
Obama’s not on the ballot and it is widely expected that black turn-out will decrease in this election, not increase. So what rationale could possibly justify oversampling by 77% (10/13) an ethnic group that voted 95% Democrat in the last election?
Based on this, we assume somewhere around 170% of blacks will vote Democrat in this election. Of course, this will necessarily require a major “get out the vote” effort in cemeteries across the country, but those are traditional Democrat strongholds.
Second, self-identified party breakdown (weighted) in this poll shows 28% Republicans, 38% Democrats and 45% Independents. Do CBS and the New York Times really think Democrats outnumber Republicans by 35% (10/28) in a year when Republicans are expected to dominate the balloting? For god’s sake, man, Obama only won by 7% in in 2008 in what was widely considered a runaway election.
To show just how distorted these figures are, on the same day this CBS/New York Times poll was released, Gallup released a poll on the composition of likely 2010 voters. It shows 55% Republican/Lean Republican, 40% Democrat/Lean Democrat and 4% Independent.
Of course, it’s always possible that Gallup oversampled racist, sexist, homophobic conservatives. But we doubt it.
Source: CBS News, Gallup
