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Originally Posted by samcol
Is this more important than standard phone polling?
Or is this just another case of the Paulbot spammers?
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If the New Jersey caucus is representative, it sounds like a fun party.....
a happy hour followed by a straw poll.
Are these caucuses an interesting exercise in grass roots democracy involving the most committed of likely voters in a handful of communities.....sure.
Are they statistically representative of all likely primary voters.....nope, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I dont doubt that Ron Paul supporters are probably more committed than most and were probably more aware of these caucuses (through their active online community) than others, thus their greater level of participation in such events.
Phone polling by reputable and professional pollsters have proven statistical credibility. The staw polls at these so-called caucus events are more like SLOP surveys, so no, they are not more important:
A good poll story begins with a good poll. At the heart of a good poll is a randomly selected representative sample of the target population. Unfortunately, bad polls and bad samples are everywhere, and stories based on those flawed polls find their way on air or into print with dismaying frequency. One reason is that it’s hard and sometimes prohibitively expensive to collect a random or representative sample. Instead, some researchers use convenience samples.
One common type of convenience sample produces surveys that researchers call self-selected opinion polls, or SLOP surveys. As the name suggests, the sample in a SLOP survey is not selected randomly. Instead, individuals choose whether to participate. Margin of sampling error cannot be estimated for a SLOP poll, no matter how large...
...Researchers have learned, often to their great embarrassment, that these types of samples often produce flawed results. Respondents who volunteer to participate in such surveys tend to be more extreme or otherwise very different in their views than those who do not. In no way can they be said to be representative of the population, so the survey results cannot be used to say anything useful about a target population.
http://www.aapor.org/badandworsesamples
Thankfully, the only polls that count begin in 3 weeks and by mid-Feb, we'll know the two major party candidates.