2nd debate, who won? Obama or Romney?

[gergroy]

GameOver22 said:

gergroy said:

GameOver22 said:

Hmmm....Am I misreading something. You said independents make up roughly 1/3 of the electorate. I'm saying they don't because most people identifying as independents actually have a partisan preference. True independents actually make up about 1/10 of the electorate.

yes, because we were talking about how the numbers were adding up in a poll.  regardless of what their political leanings. a little more than a third of the country identify themselves as independents.  That is what we were talking about.  

Yes, and depending on which independents you poll, you will get different results, possibly unrepresentative of the voting population. Obviously democratic leaners are going to answer differently from republican leaners. Just lumping all independents into one category will likely result in an unrepresentative sample and a biased poll. That is the point I was driving at.

yes, but polls aren't done based on political affiliation, so your point is moot.  They concentrate on groups like race, gender, education, etc.  If the pollsters do their job right, they get enough samples from each target to get a acceptable sampling that could mirror that population.  That is actually one of the reasons that republicans have been complaining about the polls this year because the amount of democrats being polled are 8 to 10 points higher than democrat turnout in 2008. 

Here is how gallup weights their polls.

Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, cell phone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2011 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.