Legal Commentary

NBC/WSJ Poll: Oversampling

By Jeralyn

The new NBC/WSJ poll (pdf) out today has Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tied at 45%. The margin of error is 3.7%. The poll was of all registered voters, not just Democrats. Both Hillary and Obama's unfavorability ratings increased somewhat from two weeks ago. Combining the "somehat "and "very negative" categories, Obama was at 28% unfavorable two weeks ago and is at 32% now. Hillary was at 43% and is now at 48%.

Given that these numbers include Republicans, I'm not surprised. What did surprise me is that the poll says it oversampled African Americans.

In addition, we oversampled African-Americans in order to get a more reliable cross-tab on many of the questions we asked in this poll regarding Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race and overall response to last week's Rev. Jeremiah Wright dustup.

I don't get it. Does anyone have an explanation or think the results are more reliable or less because of the oversampling?

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).