Tomorrow, Pres. Bush visits the Topeka-based district of Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS). As of early this week, an NRCC poll showed Ryun down 2 points to Dem Nancy Boyda.
Up to now, I've only heard about a Sunday visit. Is anyone else hearing about a Friday arrival? And if they got that wrong, how much stock do we place in their reporting on the NRCC poll? Apparently the Ryun campaign did an internal poll a month ago that put him at 50%, Boyda at 33%. Boyda's internal polling from an overlapping time period had her within the margin of error.
I'm told that internal polling from the Boyda camp now puts her outside the margin ahead of Ryun. It's fascinating to watch this race develop.
Don't forget, on September 14, Ryun spokeman Jeffrey Black responded to a poll showing Boyda ahead:
“If any legitimate, scientific polling firm found these results, the national Democrats would not have written off this race as reported by the Kansas City Star on Sept. 14,” he said.
In a review of DCCC and NRCC spending, MyDD found that the DCCC spent $338,912 to the NRCC's $26,866. Who has written whom off?
Update: The Hotline got it wrong:
The White House on Thursday confirmed reports that President Bush will visit Kansas this weekend to stump for Republican Rep. Jim Ryun, who’s facing a tougher-than-expected race for re-election.
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My brother is a photo-journalist in Joplin, MO. I've gotten a couple of emails from him this Friday as he covers the George Bush visit there today.
He's had time to send these emails because the security for this visit has been quite extensive and intrusive, forcing the reporters to sit and wait--a lot.
In the last 25 years, he's covered several visits from Presidents and other big wigs in that area. This is the tightest and most invasive security that he's ever seen.
When the Prez comes to visit your town, prepare yourselves for lots of blocked streets, traffic disruptions, and closed businesses.
What is an "internal poll" and the "margin of error"? Just curious. :)
And is YOUR brother a photojournalist in Joplin? I graduated from Pittsburg State. :)
Yup. He works at KODE.
Bush is a good barometer for trouble spots on the Republican map. Anywhere he appears to stump for a candidate, you can bet the voters have awakened to the fact that their right-wing representative is representing interests other than his/her own. Glad to see Shrub finds it necessary to put out so many fires across the country. Even in areas where he won handily in 2004. Maybe there is hope for America. Vote November 7 for your own interests, not those of the wingnuts!
An internal poll is a poll commissioned by the campaign (it also can refer to a poll commissioned by a party organization on a candidate's behalf). They are somewhat suspect since a campaign doesn't have to release all of its polls, giving you the possibility of selection bias against bad results. To my knowledge, though, the Boyda camp has released all of its polls, while the Ryun camp is refusing to release its latest (presumably bad) results.
A margin of error is a measure of how much you could expect the percentages of a poll to vary due to random chance. The same way that a true coin will not necessarily come up heads exactly 50% of the time, randomly sampling a population gives you an estimate of support that is fairly accurate, but not infinitely so. MoE decreases as sample size rises. As a rule of thumb, when the percentages for both candidates are within a margins of error of each other (actually more, but don't sweat that), it's best to treat them as tied, and disregard differences of 1-2 points, since a sample from a truly tied population would give you differences of that size by random chance too often for it to matter.
"Within the margin of error" means "tied." "Above and outside the margin of error" means "winning," though in this case there are enough undecideds that a lot can still change depending how they make up their minds.