Per PCCC, the poll was done by Public Policy Polling for Moveon. It claims to have obtained the results from 629 likely Dem primary voters, MOE 3.9%.
I may have been part of this poll. I received a call asking me who I was supporting. John Tree was the first candidate mentioned. When I hit 1 or whatever to show my support for Tree, I wasn't asked the other questions showing. Not sure if I wasn't asked because I hit 1 for Tree or because it was a different poll. I was only surprised it wasn't a push poll.
Public Policy Polling claims "highly accurate polling across the country", so who am I to say this isn't accurate. However, a few folks on Capitol Fax are questioning what would account for such a surge in Ilya's popularity. In January, Ilya was up 23% to Brad's 21%. People are wondering what accounts for the surge. Ilya's robo-calls are not making him more popular with the people I know. I even took those silly Internet polls to make the calls stop coming, and I'm still getting the calls.
Could the vicious out-of-district based campaign against Brad Schneider be working? If that many people belong to PCCC, PDA and DFA out here, I sure have not seen them around over the past 8 years or so. I've never been to a routine DFA or PDA meeting where I wasn' t the only person from the Tenth. Our own Tenth District DFA disbanded years ago.
I'm not sure how Public Policy Polling works or how they choose their samples, but they give a few hints here. They say they purchase voter registration rolls and send them out to have phone numbers attached. They do not do a random phone dialing. They target "likely voters", but they don't explain in detail what they use to determine "likely". From their high level explanation, it seems that they looked for people who consistently vote in Democratic primaries in the past, that would include me and I got a call. This method of sampling could exclude a lot of voters newly energized or new to the District. I'm guessing some Democrats in the parts of our District who were in the Eight in the past might have been less motivated to pull Democratic ballots in primaries due to small choice of candidates and less likelihood of success. When I canvassed the Eight for Kerry in 2004, we met many people who identified Democrat, but pulled Republican ballots because the Republican primaries were the only really contested elections around. It's also possible that the motivated Eight District Democratic primary voters, trying so hard to get rid of Blue Dog Bean, are not exactly representative of the whole. I don't think the Scheurer voters are necessarily representative of Democrats in our new Tenth/old Eight parts. I'll end this section by saying that they didn't call it EDDI for nothing--Eight District Democrats and Independents.
I did a little research on polls and margin of error. Here is what they say about that on Fallacy Watch:
How can we tell when the results of a poll are off by more than the MoE? If a poll gives very different results from others taken around the same time, or shows a sudden and large change from previous polls, this suggests that the unusual result may be due to sampling error. No one can know for sure whether sampling error is responsible for polls with surprising results, but the fact that 1 in 20 polls can be expected to be significantly in error should encourage us to regard such poll results with skepticism. Moreover, it's important to pay attention to all of the polls taken on a given topic at a particular time, otherwise you'll have no way of knowing whether a poll you're looking at is giving wildly different results than comparable polls.
We'll find out soon enough.
If PCCC, DFA and PDA are successful in shoving Ilya Sheyman down our throats, I wonder if they'll still be around to work for him between March 21 and November. Are they going to find it as much fun when they have to deal with Dold's seemingly unlimited war chest or his hit squad on the blogs or the venues that let Republicans speak, but deny Democrats the same courtesy? I have a feeling they are going to find funner and sexier races elsewhere and we'll be left holding the bag in November.