Quote:
Originally posted by lendaddy
You think 40% of Americans are Democrats and 26% are Republicans?
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Ahhh.... well I'm not sure, but it does seem low...I think RallyJon's explanation sounds reasonable. To be fair, there's nothing wrong with the actual results... the problem seems to be in their interpretation of the results. A more correct interpretation would be:
"Based on the the polling of 1018 respondents, we estimate that 26% of Americans
would declare themselves to be Republicans +/- x%" (as per RallyJon's explanation)
I'm not sure what the sampling error would be on 1018 resondents though, but 3% does not seem unreasonable... The sampling error is based on a number of factors:
# of responses
The actual distribution of of the underlying population (50-50 vs 80-20)
# of potential answers (I think)
I cant seem to find the right section in all of my old texts, but Wikipeda has a small blurb on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll
They also could have effe'd up the entire sampling process by only phoning people in California for example (but I'd imagine they control for things like geographical heterogeneity).