Most political observers know to stop reading when they see the phrase, “According to a poll from Zogby Interactive…” and yet, yesterday, I couldn’t believe the commotion caused by a poll that obviously didn’t make any sense.
About 24 hours ago, Zogby Interactive released a national poll showing John Edwards and Barack Obama leading each of the top five Republican presidential hopefuls in a hypothetical general-election match-up. The same poll, however, showed Hillary Clinton trailing the same five candidates (even Romney and Huckabee, who usually fare poorly due to low national name recognition). Reuters ran this report:
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton trails five top Republican presidential contenders in general election match-ups, a drop in support from this summer, according to a poll released on Monday.
Clinton’s top Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and John Edwards, still lead Republicans in hypothetical match-ups ahead of the November 4, 2008, presidential election, the survey by Zogby Interactive showed.
As it turns out, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Blogs jumped on the poll results, as did all of the cable news networks.
Around the same time, Gallup released a similar poll, gauging the results of match-ups of the top two Dems against the top four Republicans. These results were in line with reality — Dems up, GOP down.
Take a wild guess which of these two polls sparked a mini media frenzy.
Greg Sargent explains:
The Zogby one is an online poll, a notoriously unreliable method, while the Gallup one is a telephone poll. And, as Charles Franklin of Pollster.com observed yesterday, the Zogby poll is completely out of sync with multiple other national polls finding Hillary with a lead over the GOP candidates. The Zogby poll actually found that Mike Huckabee is leading Hillary in a national matchup. The Gallup findings were in line with most other surveys. […]
The Zogby survey was covered repeatedly on CNN, earned coverage from MSNBC, Fox News, and Reuters and was covered by multiple other smaller outlets.
By contrast, I can’t find a single example of any reporter or commentator on the major networks or news outlets referring to the Gallup poll at all, with the lone exception of UPI. While the Zogby poll was mentioned by multiple reporters and pundits, the only mentions the Gallup poll got on TV were from Hillary advisers who had to bring it up themselves on the air in order to inject it into the conversation.
Of course, every political reporter, editor, and producer in the country knew that Zogby Interactive results were unreliable, but they trumpeted the results anyway.
There’s probably more than one explanation of this, but I suspect the Zogby Interactive data was what I think of as an IKI Poll — “I knew it” poll.
For a couple of years now, when rumors that Hillary Clinton would run first emerged (say, around 2006), the conventional wisdom was that she would struggle in a general-election campaign. Sure, she could win in the primaries, but she would fare poorly against a Republican nominee.
And ever since, all the data has shown otherwise. Indeed, all year long, poll after poll showed Clinton leading the GOP field in hypothetical match-ups. The predictions weren’t playing out, at least not yet.
And then along comes the Zogby Interactive poll, which, wouldn’t you know it, offered numbers that were exactly in line with what the chattering class has expected for a year. “A ha!” said reports. “I knew it!”
The media wanted a poll that confirmed pre-existing suspicions. In this case, the fact that the results didn’t make any sense was apparently not much of a concern.
Wouldn’t responsible journalism require news outlets to a) note why professional pollsters discount Zogby Interactive data; and b) also highlight the Gallup numbers with equal enthusiasm?
Update: From Hillary Hub: “As of about 9AM, the Zogby poll was covered on TV news 15 times and the Gallup poll was mentioned twice – by the Hillary campaign’s Mark Penn and Ann Lewis.”