New Nevada Poll Worthless

Seems like I was right in wondering how soft the numbers of the new Nevada poll published yesterday were. As it turns out the sample was 600 regular voters with 240 Democrats. So, Hillary's lead in the poll is among 240 regular Democratic voters who weren't asked if they have attended a caucus before, if they will attend this caucus, or if they even know what a caucus is.
It's pretty incredible that a poll with 600 respondents should have a margin of error of 4 percent as they claim. That should be at least five in my opinion. Then take the 240 sample and you have a huge margin of error which makes the poll absolutely worthless.

This poll was commissioned by KRNV and the Reno Gazette-Journal. It's sad to see that they were not able to commission a poll worth talking about, one with a decent sample and without Gore and Clark who are clearly not running at this point (or ever).

For this reason Chris Bowers over at MyDD is actually considering fielding their own polls at four seperate times before the Nevada Caucus in January:

I am led to wonder if MyDD itself would be able to make up some of the gap. For a little under $10K (Update [2007-3-10 20:54:27 by Jonathan Singer]: The cost would be in the range of $9,500 TOTAL for the four polls), MyDD could commission Survey USA to conduct four polls in Nevada: one in March, one in June, one in September, and one in December. Compared to other polls that will come out on Nevada, we could make sure that only announced candidates were in the questioning, that undecideds were not pushed too hard, that second choices were given, that there was a decently sized sample, that there were lots of good demographic crosstabs, and still probably have a better likely voter screen than anyone else around. With four polls like this, we could build trend lines, and basically be the organization for Nevada polling during the 2007-8 nomination process.

So, much question to you is this: would you be interested in contributing money for a project such as this? We would not have to collect it all right away, and could instead hold fundraisers when it is time for the next poll. MyDD has also been saving some of our ad money for special projects like these, so we could cover some of the costs ourselves. My question to you is: would you contribute money in order for this project to get off the ground?

Fielding a decent poll costs money of course, money which the KRNV and RGJ apparently don't have. So, if you think this is a worthy endeavour, go over to MyDD let them know what you think and help them out.