The poll results that I blogged about yesterday are reported in today’s Chron, with the usual carping from the Perry and Strayhorn camps about methodologies. The one point to highlight is here:
Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin and a founder of Pollster.com, said the biggest problem with Internet-based polling like Zogby’s is that the people who sign up to be surveyed are very interested in politics.
Even if Zogby weights the population of the poll sample to reflect the population of the state, Franklin said a political survey of volunteers is likely one of people who already had strong feelings about politics and the candidates.
Franklin said there can be variability in any poll. So Perry’s drop may not mean much, especially if nothing happened to cause it, he said.
“Perry’s movement right now isn’t large enough for me to be convinced that Perry has dropped significantly,” Franklin said.
This is true, and though I think that Texans for Insurance Reform poll that had Perry at 41%, which is about as high as he’s ever been in the polls, is an outlier, it’s still a counterweight to these two results and needs to be factored in when discussing the status quo. As always, the more polls you have the better picture you have because no two samples are identical. I just wish we’d get more of them.