I’m looking at the internals of this amazing new Survey USA poll that shows Kaine up by 9% using their cool poll-tracking program. It displays a trend line of their polling since June 30, and lets users pick a specific internal — such as “Education: No College,” or “Region: Shenandoah.” I’m flipping through it and finding that Kaine is leading just about every demographic. Every age group, every race, both sexes, most regions of the state, and every geocode — Kaine rules them all, often by significant margins, groups that he was often behind in just a month ago.
I have to point out that when looking at internals like this, the numbers get real small. SUSA polled 1,500 people, of whom less than half (656) are likely voters. So the number of people polled who fit into these little categories gets small, and the margins get even smaller. So, yes, Kaine leads 53/43 among retirees, that may well represent just 130 people polled. That ten-point spread may indicate a difference of just thirteen people; if six of them had said otherwise, we’d have a tie, rather than a mini-landslide in this demographic.
Small sample though the internals may be, they may prove to be revealing when explaining the results of tomorrow’s election.
i think warner was up by 10 points going into the election, and won by 2 3 points? regardless, this is great news, and not really too surprising.
regardless, i remain catiously optomistic…
man, I hope Deeds wins too!
Then all we need to do is get James Webb to jump in and take on Goofy George Allen. let’s make allen spend some of his money, and talk, so the rest of the country can see the sort of partsaian no brain nitwit we really is….
i think warner was up by 10 points going into the election, and won by 2 3 points?
I recall the same advantage, though Warner won by just over 5%.
With all of this talk of individual polls and their wide variations (1% up – Kaine to 9% up Kaine) we sometimes forget to look at the bigger picture. The big picture shows us that no matter how small the margin all the latest polls show Kaine up. It also shows us that Independents are breaking heavily in Kaines favor and Democrats appear more loyal than Republicans. Also you should take a look at the Realclearpolitics.com average and compare the accuracy of its AVERAGES and the ACTUAL. In the case of the 2004 election the polls varied from Bush up 4 to Kerry up 2 but the average showed Bush up by 1.5% and if I remember correctly that about the margin Bush ended up winning by. Also people have said that Warner was projected to win by 10% by the SurveyUSA poll so this MUST mean that Kaine must be up by 5% to win. You can look at it that way or a way that no one seems to talk about, maybe this means that Kaines margin will only be half of what’s projected by SurveyUSA. We will know soon enough.