A few weeks ago, a poll run by DailyKos and Research 2000 (No links to DKos) conveniently claimed (in conjunction with a book Kos is writing comparing the GOP to the Taliban) that the Republican Party is overrun by kooks, freaks, racists, weirdos, birthers, teh ghey bashers, etc. Not surprisingly, said poll was greeted on the left as proof of the claims the "Reality Based Community" had always held about us, our views, our leaders, and everything not Obama.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground for the left: somebody bothered to fact check the data and ask a few questions, and they found *gasp* the poll has some serious issues. The questions include such serious polling flaws as question selection, wording, sampling, follow ups, and so forth. And when rabid right winger Nate Silver throws cold water on the poll, one must conclude that Kos was not trying to seriously sample the attitudes of his political opposites, preferring instead to have the answers written beforehand, and the fill in work performed in such a matter as to validate his ideas. Quote Silver:

In short, it appears to me that the Kos/Research 2000 poll -- probably for reasons having to do with the nature and ordering of the questions although other hypothesis are plausible {umm...agenda setting and a sense of "inevitability" that most lefty polls try to establish?-ed} -- wound up with a very and perhaps unrepresenatively conservative set of Republicans. Upon further examination, I'd encourage caution in interpreting its results. I'm happy that pollsters are exploring "politically incorrect" attitudes such as these, but they require a lot of sensitivity to survey design. I'm not sure that Research 2000's methodology, which led by hitting the respondent over the head with a 2x4 with questions about impeachment and socialism, really got it right.

Look, I am not going to deny that the GOP and Conservative Movement do not have some rough elements in it. But are they as prevalent as the left tried to claim, and then used this poll as validation? Who knows. But I do know this: any suspicions of a Kos sponsored poll being fair and reliable, all while they claim Rasmussen should be marginalized, should be supported. Any person who does not believe that DKos-R2000 is an outfit that has and will massage and manipulate numbers and data in an effort to establish a politically charged meme and a lefty self feeding sense of inevitability that polling can create needs to have their head examined. And anybody who still wants to use this poll in their agenda setting needs to fuck off with butane and do better research.

Posted by: eddiebear at 11:55 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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