I’ve posted before about a new poll, from pollster Charles Franklin, now visiting at Marquette (from UW-Madison).
Link to poll: Walker and Obama have single digit leads in Marquette Law School Poll and results & data (instrument, methodology, and full topline results).
Franklin’s a serious pollster and political scientist, and he’s one of the founders of a polling site now nesting at the Huffington Post
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/pollster).
His first poll in this series is odd, though. Both Walker and Obama have small leads against possible challengers. Over at the Journal Sentinel, Craig Gilbert — easily Wisconsin’s best reporter on polls and polling — isn’t sure what to make of it:
Until now, Gov. Scott Walker has had a negative or neutral job rating in every nonpartisan public poll since he took office.
But a new Marquette Law School survey breaks that pattern.
Walker’s approval rating is slightly higher (51%) than his disapproval rating (46%). Slightly more people think the state is going in the right direction (50%) than the wrong direction (46%). And Walker has single-digit leads over his closest Democratic challengers in hypothetical recall matchups.These numbers could partly reflect the impact of millions of dollars in pro-Walker ads since mid-November. But we’ll have to wait for more polls to be done to know whether the governor’s standing is truly ticking up in Wisconsin or whether this survey represents a blip.
In his story on the new poll, Gilbert quotes Prof. Franklin:
“This is the beginning of the election year, not the end,” says Franklin. “These incumbents (Obama and Walker) come in with advantages. In a sense, they both come in with the same advantage. Their opposition is not yet set.”
Franklin has a possible explanation — that without opponents, both incumbents do better than they otherwise might — but it’s not the only one. An alternative explanation is that this first poll in the series is an outlier, and other polls will find harder going in Wisconsin for both Walker and Obama.
Franklin talks about this as the beginning of the election year, but the same may be said of his polls.
The Left disputes the findings in the poll, contending that Franklin has underrepresented unions, Democrats, and over-represented conservatives.
Looking at Franklin’s methodology, one sees that the margins of error here are large — only one of the match-ups against Walker is outside the margin of error. Rather than 3.5-4% margins for the head-to-head matchups, the Marquette poll has margins of approx. 7.1%.
At the same time, the weighting — from actual respondents to expected distribution within the state — is often odd, and unexpected: male-female, and Republican, Democrat, & independent distributions dubiously alter prevalence from an expected proportion in the population. Franklin drops independents down to 8.5%, down from a Gallup estimate of 15%, and the Gallup findings are even farther from his unweighted distribution of only 7.6%.
Still, Craig Gilbert correctly finds in the Marquette poll confirmation of what’s almost certain, regardless of polls — most voters have decided opinions:
The fact that [State Sen. Tim] Cullen gets 40% against Walker even though only 18% know enough to have an opinion about him reflects the fact that most voters are locked in no matter who the Democratic candidate is.
This first Marquette poll is in need of corroboration. It may be right, but considering polls that have come before it, and the unexpected weighting, there’s reason to be cautious and skeptical.