So, been sitting here all day waiting for someone to take a hit for the team and post Overtime Politics new poll on the Maine caucuses.
But no one is willing to get sacked for reporting it; so I will. Bernie is ahead 56% to 41% to 3% Undecided.
- 357 randomly dialed live interviews from public phone record searches including cellphones.
- No previous voter lists, just people with phone numbers.
- Determination of whether or not they are going to vote is by asking “Are you planning on voting on March 6? If so, which caucus? R or D.
- They then split based on R or D and ask about candidate preferences.
Here is his result pdf.
In case you are new to Overtime Politics, this is a guy with some callers, who collects phone numbers and then starts his team dialing. Polling at its very simplest. He applies no real filters, no games or tricks. Just random people and a short set of questions.
He is grassroots polling in the truest sense of the word, and for some reason that really annoys a lot of people here on DK. A community that used to encourage grassroots involvement in the process and non-corporate driven contributions to our country and government; seriously has it out for this guy.
He’s been called a scam artist; but I am not able to figure out what the scam would be. Not seeing ad revenue on the site of any significant amount.
He’s been called a fraud, but he had the best results in Iowa; he called it Hillary by 1%; none of the reputable firms managed that.
In my mind he’s just a guy with some friends/employees, unlimited calling and a copy of MS Excel, doing his thing. And because he polls in odd places where others don’t; I find his data points to be interesting and worth noting.
And to be clear, I take all polling with large amounts of salt. The sophisticated ones with their filters and models require really deep transparency. Something like this, and the guy has occasionally had spreadsheet errors, are much simpler to judge. It’s just a bunch of numbers summed up from answers to a small set of questions.