Soccer Dad

And the survey says ... old

Recently the Numbers Guy explained how Family Feud gets its survey responses:

Today, the show employs a polling firm, Applied Research-West, to conduct the surveys by telephone. The company's operators follows standard survey practices: They use random-digit dialing; try to ensure their sample is representative of the U.S. population, according to Census data; and dial cellphones to reach the growing landline-free population. The surveyers don't disclose that the questions are for "Family Feud." A typical phone survey includes 30 or 40 questions, culled from 100 submitted to Ms. Johnston daily by writers and consultants for the show. Topical questions may air as soon as three weeks after the survey responses have been collected and compiled.

These measures surprised professional pollsters who assumed a show seeking polling numbers for entertainment purposes wouldn't work very hard to get them.

"You're kidding," Paul J. Lavrakas, former chief methodologist at Nielsen Media Research, says.

"I'm just impressed that a game show goes through the trouble," says Ms. Mathiowetz.

The one weakness noted about this approach was:

The pollsters, however, aren't entirely won over by the methodology; 100 respondents doesn't make for the most reliable results. A poll that size typically has a statistical margin of error of plus or minus 10% for the No. 1 answers.

Scott Rasmussen, whose firm gathered polling data for a CBS show similar to "Feud" called "Power of 10," which is on hiatus, surveyed 1,000 people for each question. He says he thinks 100 is too small a number for polling results to be representative.

I wonder if the AP even did that much to get this result.

Now more than ever, it's the old guy against the agent of change.

Ask people to blurt out their first words about the two presidential candidates and one in five say "change" or "outsider" for Barack Obama and "old" for John McCain, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll released Monday. Those are not only the top responses for each man but the ones used most often since January, when fewer than one in 10 volunteered those descriptions.

Well apparently they did interview more people, but I wonder if this is an appropriate way to determine how people feel. And is this news, or an attempt to influence perceptions?

Meanwhile the approval ratings of the Democratically led Congress continue to drop. So for all the talk about the problems with the Republican "brand," why aren't the Republicans doing better?

So why are the Republicans running scared, and why aren't they going after the "new Democratic Congress" hammer-and-tongs? Beats me. Because they're idiots, I guess.

And when Congressional Democrats are insisting on political progress in Iraq, it's interesting that they have achieved none of their stated goals over the past two years. In other words the fledgling Iraqi government has been more successful than Congress.

Remarkably, despite everything, Sen. McCain only trails Sen. Obama by two points in the latest Gallup poll. (via memeorandum)

If the Republicans would start running more forcefully against the Democratic Congress, perhaps they could make some inroads too and we won't see the predicted shellacking in November.