Zogby poll on Obama lands like proverbial tree in the forest when nobody’s there to hear it

March 25th, 2009 at 10:23am Pat Cunningham

 

 I told you HERE yesterday that disreputable pollster John Zogby (above)  was due to publish a survey purporting to show a big decline in President Obama’s approval rating.

 Well, the POLL is out — but virtually nobody is paying it any attention. It didn’t even warrant a link on the Drudge Report, which usually is a sucker for even the most unreliable of polls if they skew to the right. Nor have I discerned a lot of crowing in the right-wing blogosphere. (THIS GUY, a libertarian, got a little excited, but he seems to be talking mostly to himself.)

 Among the problems with Zogby’s poll is that it was conducted online, which means that participants volunteered to be surveyed.  Such methodology doesn’t exactly jibe with the principles of scientific polling. Oh, Zogby probably tries a few tricks to lend credence to his sample, but the poll isn’t much more reliable than any of those useless online polls you see on Web sites all over the place.

 Let me be clear about all of this. I don’t reject Zogby’s poll merely because it claims to reflect a decline in Obama’s popularity. Indeed, I’ve been predicting for weeks that the president’s numbers are likely to slip a bit pretty soon. No, I just don’t like polls that are unscientific, even if the results favor my side of the political spectrum.

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