Monday, January 18, 2010

Massachusetts

Via Hot Air Headlines, the last poll from American Research Group, Inc. before the actual vote in tomorrow's special election has come out, showing Brown ahead of Coakley 52-45, with Kennedy tied with "undecided" at 2% each. The poll of was conducted from January 15-17 and consisted of 600 randomly selected likely voters, of whom 42% were Democrats, 15% were Republicans and 43% were not enrolled with either party. The margin of error is +/-4%. That means that Brown's lead as reported by this poll is within the margin of error.

I think that news is actually a little more striking than it appears, since 51%, not 43% of Massachusetts voters are independent, with only 13% Republican and 36% Democrat.

If you take the internal percentages of each group reported by American Research and then weight them for party affiliation, the split becomes Brown 53.5%, Coakley 43.8%, Kennedy 1.7% and undecided 2%. Brown's lead goes from 7% to 9.7%, beyond the margin of error.

Of course, weighting the sample like that assumes that the percentage of actual voters who turn out tomorrow will be divided 51/36/13, Independent, Democrat and Republican.

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