A little more detail on that LA Times poll.
Yesterday we brought you news of the new poll out from the LA Times and Bloomberg. The headline was a virtual dead-heat on the Democratic side in both New Hampshire and Iowa.
But there’s a bit more there in the details about Iowa. And here it gets a touch technical.
In Iowa the numbers for Democrats who plan to attend the caucuses is Clinton (29%), Obama (26%), Edwards (25%). With the 4% margin of error, that’s basically a tie.
In yesterday’s LA Times article it gave a separate set of numbers for “voters who said they are certain or very likely to actually participate in the Iowa caucuses.” ‘Very likely voters’ is usually such a tight ‘screen’ that we somewhat discounted these results, which are better for both Clinton and Edwards. They’re Clinton (31%), Edwards (25%) and Obama (22%). The same applies even more to ‘certain’. And the more respondents you screen out, the higher the margin of error becomes.
But when we looked this morning at the actual poll internals it just says ‘likely voters’. The Times article was also revised to remove ‘certain’.
These may seem like small semantic points but they suggest significantly different ways of interpreting the numbers.
In any case, the upshot is that based on what we know now, we’d give more weight to the likely voter number. It’s still pretty much anyone’s game, but the news is better for Clinton than we’d thought, and at least indirectly better for Edwards too.
