Rick Casey has some good observations about that Chron poll that was released Saturday. The main point I want to focus on is here:
[Peter Brown] leads with 24 percent of the vote, but given that he had the airwaves to himself for a month, it’s hard to see how he lifts his total much above this in the next two weeks.
What’s more, a chunk of his TV-juiced support may be based on name recognition and easily peeled off.
This is precisely what I was talking about when I asked about how Zogby was defining “likely voters”. A sample of “registered voters”, which did not try to narrow it down to those who really are a good bet to show up at the ballot box, may well include a lot of people who chose Brown because they’ve seen his ads, but who may not wind up voting at all. It’s not that Brown has to worry about someone else stealing them from him – first and foremost, he has to make sure they actually cast a vote. If that’s the case, then this poll really didn’t tell us that much.
My point is not that Brown’s support is overstated. Everyone, myself included, expected his advertising blitz to move the numbers for him to some extent. My point is that we don’t know enough about how this poll was conducted to judge it sufficiently. It’s a tough task, and I can tell you that nobody really knows how big the likely voter pool is this year. I just hope Zogby took a legitimate guess at what they think it will be, and sampled accordingly. And I wish they’d been clear enough in the description of their methodology so we could know that for sure.
They released some internals online, seems like they relied on people self identifying how likely they were to vote, and only included vlikely (84%), or likely (16%). If that is the case and they surveyed enough voters to get over 600 self identified likely voters, that seems fairly reasonable.
I was one of those called, and yes, it was a pure self-identify, with one of the very first questions being “how likely are you to vote” and the list starting with very likely.