According to a KING-5/SurveyUSA poll, Washington state bucked the national trend, with a majority of viewers here saying that John McCain won last night’s debate.
Okay. I guess that’s possible. I’m often told that Seattle is different from every other place in the world, so why shouldn’t Washington state be different from the rest of the nation? But here’s the part that jumped out at me:
Immediately following tonight’s debate between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, SurveyUSA interviewed 1,000 state of Washington adults, of whom 631 watched tonight’s debate.
Really? Over 63% of Washington adults watched last night’s debate? That figure seems awfully high, especially considering that according to the overnight Neilsen ratings, only 30% of Seattle-Tacoma TVs were tuned in to the event. (39% in the Portland market.) The final data won’t be released until Monday, but if the trends from the 55 top markets hold true, then about 57 million Americans watched last night’s debate.
Let’s for the sake of argument assume that all 57 million viewers were adults, 18 or older (although I know for a fact that at least one was an 11-year-old girl), and that adults comprise about 75% of the roughly 305 million people who now populate our nation. That would mean that only about 25% of American adults (57/(305*.75)) watched last night’s debate.
Not 63%. I know we’re different, but not that different. In fact, according to Nielsen, Seattle-Tacoma’s debate ratings were actually on the low end, ranking only 46th out of 55 markets.
So, let’s just say I have some questions about the validity SurveyUSA’s sample.
What makes this report even more interesting/questionable is a story by Jennifer Dlouhy of Heart Newspapers today (I found it in The Olympian. She sites McCain advisors as saying that they are going to begin pulling out of Washington state to start focusing on Pennyslvania and Michigan which “are perhaps closer than Washington state is now.” If Washingtonians thought McCain won the debate so handily, why pull out now?
Hell, I care about that shit and I didn’t even watch the debate (I got free tickets to the Mariners). I suspect that if you call people who were at home during the debate, you’ll get more responses than from people who are out (unless you call cell phones).
Another reason not to believe this result, from the crosstabs, table 2 (age group winner bolded):
age 18-34 — McCain 42%, Obama 37%, Not sure 20%
age 35-49 — McCain 42%, Obama 37%, Not sure 21%
age 50-64 — McCain 32%, Obama 43%, Not sure 25%
age 65-99 — McCain 43%, Obama 32%, Not sure 26%
Yep, only Boomers like me thought Obama won the day. Not Gen X, not Millennials. Just Boomers.
Interesting Poll. I guess the pollsters figgered which areas were a waste to call-check and called the more intelligent viewers. Must be a real shock the Moonbat!s here.
Ah yes, Polls…Here’s an interesting quote from the CNN site:
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A national poll of people who watched the first presidential debate suggests that Barack Obama came out on top, but there was overwhelming agreement that both Obama and John McCain would be able to handle the job of president if elected.
Most debate watchers agreed both McCain and Obama would be able to handle the job of president if elected.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey is not a measurement of the views of all Americans, since only people who watched the debate were questioned and the audience included more Democrats than Republicans.
Fifty-one percent of those polled thought Obama did the better job in Friday night’s debate, while 38 percent said John McCain did better.
Men were nearly evenly split between the two candidates, with 46 percent giving the win to McCain and 43 percent to Obama. But women voters tended to give Obama higher marks, with 59 percent calling him the night’s winner, while just 31 percent said McCain won.
“It can be reasonably concluded, especially after accounting for the slight Democratic bias in the survey, that we witnessed a tie in Mississippi tonight,” CNN Senior Political Researcher Alan Silverleib said. “But given the direction of the campaign over the last couple of weeks, a tie translates to a win for Obama.”
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Gotta love it: First they don’t have an even distribution and jilt the resuls to one side. Then when results show that it’s a tie…they claim a tie is actually a win for Obama.
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Yeah, I can see how they’d come up with 63% — if nobody answers the phone, they try another number, and keep trying more numbers, until someone answers. So maybe 63% of the people who were home did watch the debate.
After all, if they counted the people who didn’t answer the phone, how could they know whether those people watched the debate or not?
They are saying more people watched the debate then will actually vote.
They polled Washington State ADULTS, not registered voters. Not all adults are registered voters which makes the numbers more unbelievable
The only poll that matters is election day.
And that is over month away.
RR @ 6 is on the right track. It’s a poll confined to people who were home right after the debate, and who answered the phone.
That skews the sample rural, married, internet-negative and sex-negative (among other biases).
Also note that “who won” or “more likely to vote for” questions are noise, not data. They don’t correlate to pre-event vs post-event poll preferences.
One point to consider is that not everyone watched the debate on TV. I, for instance, watched it over the internet.
I did, however, think Obama totally outclassed McCain, who came off as completely out of touch.
Did McCain try to come off as the grouchy old man who keep srepeating the same thing over and over? I felt sorry for him after a while – “What Sen., Obama doesn’t understands…..blah, bl;ah blah and there was Obama – not only understanding things on a much deeper level, but keeping his cool (unlike mcain who seeme dunhinged and unable to even look at his opponent of listen to what he said.
National polls are showing most other americans felt like me – McCain kept repeating the same things and lost the debate. I guess he forgot that insulting your opponent not only doesn’t win debate points but looks bad as well.
I do like how arah Palin agreed with Obama that we should pursue bin Laden in Pakistan – but then was quickly shut up by the McCain campaign as they view her as someone who should not express any viewpoints and is only here for ticket “balance”. Can they manage her any more tightly? Do they (the McCain campaign) not trust her as much as they seem to? They restrict access to Palin, make sure the debate format will not ask any tough follow-up questions and negate any policy pronouncements she makes – yet they continue to claim she is qualified to be VP (and president if necessary) but they do not treat her that way. Makes you wonder what they are hiding and why….