Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Polls can be useless -- point illustrated this week.

Two separate polls of Americans taken at the same time, came up with completely different results outside of their margins of error.

A CBS News/NYT poll, taken March 7-11, 2012 of 1009 adults, suggests that President Obama's approval rating has sunk to 41%, in what they called a "new low" in their polling.

Meanwhile a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken March 8-11, 2012 of 1084 adults, suggests that President Obama's approval rating has grown to 50%.

Oddly enough, there were more registered Republicans (as a percentage of total # surveyed) in the Reuters poll than people who said that they would vote in a Republican primary in the CBS poll.

So which is it?  Is Obama's approval rating going up, or is it going down?  I think it's closer to 50% than 41%, just by examining Real Clear Politics' 2 week average -- CBS' poll is clearly an outlier.

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