Rasmussen Poll Says Hillary Doing Best in PA, but Data is Buried in Report
By Deb Cupples on May 23, 2008 at 11:08 PM in Current Affairs
Today, Rasmussen reports the following polling results regarding Pennsylvania’s presidential election in November 2008:.
| Clinton |
50% | …. | Obama | 45% |
| McCain | 39% | McCain | 43% |
Apparently, Hillary is doing far better against John McCain in Pennsylvania than Barack Obama is. Given that the margin of error is 4%, Obama and McCain are statistically tied.
Oddly, that’s not what Rasmussen’s headline indicates. The relevant part of the headline reads "Pennsylvania: Obama 45% McCain 43%."
No, it’s not a mis-print: though Hillary performed better, her name is not in the headline. In fact, Hillary isn’t even mentioned until the report’s seventh paragraph.
What are the chances that busy readers will actually get to Paragraph 7, if the first six paragraphs (plus the title) give readers the impression that they’ve already gotten the gist the report? Why read any further?
Incidentally, here’s the first part of Paragraph 7, which is almost half way through the report:
"In the unlikely event that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic
Presidential Nomination, she leads McCain in Pennsylvania by eleven
percentage points, 50% to 39%. The former First Lady is viewed
favorably by 52% of voters in the state."
The Democrats still haven’t formally chosen a nominee, right? They haven’t yet figured out which candidate has the better chance of beating McCain in November?
And Pennsylvania still is a large, swing state — no? I’m just checking, because the way that Rasmussen’s report was written, I figured I might have missed a major news story today.
Over the last few months, I’ve grown accustomed to journalists acting as political campaigners, but I’ve often thought that major polling outfits at least try to conduct — and report — polling data in an objective way.
That way, the polling outfits, themselves, would not taint their future results by indirectly influencing the very public opinion that they purportedly seek to understand and describe.
I stand corrected. Perhaps we should just be grateful that Rasmussen bothered to include Hillary in the survey at all.
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