Daily Kos, an influential liberal website, recently released a poll showing that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was just nine points behind Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown in the Democratic primary race for governor.
Within minutes, the San Francisco Chronicle posted a blog item saying the poll showed the race was "narrowing," comparing it to a June survey, conducted by a different company, that gave Brown a 20-point lead over Newsom. The item was quickly picked up and posted by Rough & Tumble, California's premier political news aggregator. Then it was reported and re-blasted by "The Fix" at the Washington Post, one of the top political sites in the country. Within 12 hours, this characterization of California's race for governor became received wisdom.
There was only one problem with this wisdom: It was wrong.
The incident illustrates how political misinformation and misinterpretation can be more viral than the truth in the Internet News Age, as reporting on polls pulses through the electronic highway, launched by news organizations with little time to evaluate and sift the quality of research. In recent weeks, a series of California political surveys has produced a cacophony of often conflicting analysis, opinion and reporting that served to confuse readers and distort political perceptions.
For example, comparing and measuring the Daily Kos poll, conducted by Research 2000, against the previous poll -- done with a completely different methodology by Moore Methods Research of Sacramento -- created a false equivalency. In fact, a recent follow-up poll by poll director James Moore, who has long experience in California, found that, far from tightening, Brown's lead over Newsom has grown to 29 percentage points.
A poll's methodology -- including the sample size, method of selection and phrasing of questions -- is crucial. The Daily Kos survey, for example, used random digit dialing to reach California adults. To identify them as "likely voters," pollsters asked respondents several questions, including whether they considered themselves Democrats or Republicans. But identifying 600 likely voters didn't provide the number of Democrats and Republicans statistically necessary to measure the primaries, so pollsters called more people until they had 400 self-identified Republicans and 400 self-identified Democrats. Then, as they put it, "quotas were assigned to reflect the voter registration of distribution by county."
