Time And Newsweek Polls May Overstate President Bush's Lead

Rasmussen explains why the Presidential Tracking Poll's 3-day rolling average finds a 1% lead for President Bush while an the 11% lead for President Bush was found by Time and Newsweek.

Rasmussen says there are two reasons for the difference. First, the tracking poll got bad data on Saturday:

Our current poll (showing the President ahead by just over a point) includes a Saturday sample that is way out of synch with all the days before it and with the Sunday data that followed. In fact, Saturday's one-day sample showed a big day for Kerry while all the days surrounding it showed a decent lead for the President.

It seems likely that Saturday reflects a rogue sample (especially since it was over a holiday weekend). But, it remains in our 3-day rolling average for one more day (Tuesday's report). If we drop the Saturday sample from our data, Bush is currently ahead by about 4 percentage points in the Rasmussen Reports Tracking Poll.

Second, Time and Newsweek included too many Republicans:

Four years ago, 35% of voters were Republicans, 39% were Democrats, and the rest were unaffiliated. If you apply those percentages to the Time internals, you find Bush up by about 3 percentage points. If you do the same with the Newsweek internal numbers, you find Bush with a six point lead. Those results are very close to the Rasmussen Reports data (excluding the Saturday sample).

All of this leads me to conclude that the President is currently ahead by 4 or 5 percentage points.

Rasmussen's analysis makes sense to me. the Republican National Convention was good, but even with The Kerry campaign's recent ineptness the sudden 11% lead found by Time and Newsweek seemed too good to be true.

Hey, there is nothing wrong with a 5% lead.

Comments

[sam]

I don't think Newsweek overstated the 11-point lead for Bush (I can't find the internals for the Time poll). In fact, if you look at the internals, Newsweek adjusted the results for the oversampling of Republicans. Check the math, the raw numbers show Bush with a 16-point laed, not 11 points.