Friday, January 8, 2010
40 Jealous Whores / Woods Poll: Voters Overwhelmingly Against Convention Center
Posted by Jeff Woods on Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 6:11 PM
I've seen and played a part in conducting several hundred polls dating back to 1984 and with all due respect, this poll is at questionable and at worst, horribly flawed. To put things into perspective, a poll of 401 in a city of over 650,000 is underwhelming, at best. I would be reluctant to use this tiny sample size in a city council race. I can't imagine how this is a representative sample or for that matter even relevant. While my sense is that they were attempting to write questions that were fair, it is virtually impossible to capture the complexities of this issue in a single sentence. Think about it, 200 people responded (likely punched a keypad) negatively to a question that after reading the way it is phrased would make anyone question support for the project. And who did the poll? I don't recall ever seeing a news organization identify a poll that they commissioned as an "independent poll." What is that all about? Overall, I'm not impressed.
Comments (12)
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Compare WSMV's poll to 2007 election polling results on a new convention center. The same number of voters oppose MCC in both polls; support for MCC has dropped from 37% in 2007 to 26% in 2010.
Perhaps the voters are responding to this recession, and even the supporters who thought it was a great idea 3 years ago are saying now is not the time to embark on a luxurious, budget-busting capital project.
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On second thought, support could have dropped because while voters might approve of the idea of a convention center, they don't care for the concept that this Mayor's Office has come up with. It is little more than a big tourist box that provides nothing in the way of local community use or integration with a residential community.
WSMV is a tool of Gaylord. Screw the taxpaying registered voters. They’re stupid anyway. BUILD, baby, Build!!!!
As the real Cheetos said earlier, Catherine McTameney and Darden Copeland think it's really clever to steal blog handles (Cheetos' and S-Town Mike's).
Boring, guys. Boring.
Way to get the public on your side Cheato. Apparently you have forgotten who owns the government (in theory anyway). I take it from your bitterness that you expected a better result from the taxpayer money spent with MP&F. All this negativety without the opponents access to the Tennessean and the other sites that have been spouting the industry claims for a few years. Maybe your side should start promising 30,000 new jobs again? Keep on torching Gaylord and your other tinfoil hat rantings while the peons keep storming the downtown lords' castle.
42% of total respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a council person that votes for the new convention center. That's 168 people (42% of 401).
87% of the 202 respondents that said they oppose the new convention center said they would be less likely to vote for a council person that supports the project. That's 176 respondents.
How is it possible that a subset of a subset of the total sample is larger than a subset of the total sample when both subsets were supposed to measure the same item of public opinion?
Ummm - Just asking, we call that statistics. We take a random sampling, we see how they respond and we draw conclusions for the larger population. This is how we polled English Only and how we polled the last Mayor race. (In fact, I think this is the same polling organization that handled English Only). So, both sides should be OK with polling...unless you think there was also something flawed about the prior polls too.)
It is sad that Dave Cooley is actually sending emails attacking a poll because the results are not what he likes. He has attacked everyone on the opposition personally and now a polling organization. When you don't have the message, you attack the person sending the message. This is politics 101. I hope the council and the voters see through it.
What Heading South said. Actually, 401 isn't a great number, but the validity of the number has nothing to do with the population of the city--it has to do with probability theory. The number works equally well on a country of 300 million. And these results are well within virtually any conceivable margin of error.
No, HS, this isn't just statistics. The statistical relevance of a 400 sample is questionable. A sample of under 200 is statistically irrelevant. Any pollster will tell you that.
WSMV was obviously trying to do this poll on the cheap. That's why they went with such a small sample.
But that's not my point.
The subset "Voters less likely to vote for a CM that supports the convention center" (168 people) is smaller than a subset of it ("Opponents of the convention center less likely to vote for a CM that supports the convention center" - 176 people). How can that be?
Put another way, how can the whole be smaller than a part of the whole?
You see, the subset "Opponents of the convention center less likely to vote for a CM that supports the convention center" should be a part of the larger group "Registered voters less likely to vote for a CM that supports the convention center."
BTW, don't accuse me of working for anyone lobbying for the convention center or of even supporting the convention center. I don't have a dog in that hunt. I just recognize a logical problem when I see one.
