What Zogby is allowing Drudge to do with his stuff borders on the unethical

[Hokie]

Zogby allows Drudge to cherry pick daily numbers that have a huge margin of error and splash them across his amateurish looking web site when he can glean anything negative for Obama out of them. Then Zogby backs it up with commentary that is unsupported by numbers. Those two deserve each other.

[FrenchieCat]

1. They deserve jail time as traitors along with a few others.....

[Schulzz]

2. I think people are right, Zogby wants attention. I'm predicting a draw in his final poll,

then he can say he didn't predict the wrong winner this time.

[WeDidIt]

3. Zogby uses "nonsensical party ID weightings",

Zogby/C-SPAN/Reuters

When Publishes: About 12:45 AM Eastern Time.

Key Specifications: ~1200 likely voters, 3-day rolling sample.

Track Record: Zogby's telephone polls are not quite as bad a reputed, ranking just slightly below average (his internet-based Zogby Interactive polls are another matter altogether). However, they seem to be getting worse rather than better. Zogby was one of the few pollsters to call the popular vote for Gore in 2000, but he missed high on Kerry's numbers in many state-level polls in 2004, and then had an erratic primary season this year.

House Effect/Lean: For the reasons specified below, so far has leaned Republican by a point or two.

Features/Strengths: Zogby's write-ups are generally entertaining, and he reveals more than most about the progress of the candidates in individual days' results. One of two pollsters to publish results with a decimal place intact, which we like.

Zogby is the first pollster to go to press each day, publishing in the wee hours of the morning, although the way that he accomplishes this is to split his sample periods over two days. That is, a "day's" worth of polling consists of interviews from that afternoon plus the previous night.

Quirks/Concerns: There is one very, very significant concern with Zogby, which is that he has a longstanding rule to set his party weightings based on the exit polls from the most recent election. In this case, that means 2004, when a roughly equal number of Democrats and Republicans turned out. However, according to essentially every available poll, Democrats now have somewhere between a 5-point and a 10-point advantage in party ID.

This particular procedure has bitten Zogby in the ass before. Between 2000 and 2004, there was a shift in party ID toward the Republicans; as a result, Zogby's numbers were 2-3 points high for Kerry across battleground states.

To the extent that Obama is leading in a Zogby poll, that means essentially that he'd have won the election given 2004 turnout dynamics. 2008 turnout dynamics are liable to be sigificantly more favorable to him. With that said, the relationship between Zogby's odd party ID weightings and his toplines is probably not quite 1:1, since he is weighting based not just on party ID but also a number of other factors. My guess is, for instance, that one reason that Obama always seems to do strongly in Zogby among independents is that Zogby is essentially squeezing Obama-friendly demographic groups out of his Democratic pile and erroneously classifying them as indies.

Tracking Poll Primer