Zogby International is out with a new poll that has received quite a bit of linkage recently. According to this internet survey, 50 percent of respondents indicated that they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, 5 points higher than any other serious candidate from either side of the aisle. So does this mean that Clinton is unelectable? Ah, not so fast.
It's important to begin a discussion of this poll by thinking back to April, when Zogby released a poll commissioned by Clinton-haters purporting to show that Americans are concerned with corruption linked to the Clintons. As I showed then, Zogby was more than willing to go even beyond the Clinton-haters in drafting unbalanced and biased questions to achieve his end (one question began, "Some people believe that the Bill Clinton administration was corrupt," a statement that almost begs a certain result), indicating a surprising disregard for the truth and perhaps even some deep seated feelings towards the Clintons.
Not only have serious questions been raised about Zogby in relation to the Clintons -- as well as his allegedly improper techniques and his certainly incorrect prediction in 2004 -- but in the past Zogby's internet polling has been reliably unreliable. To give just a few examples from Zogby's final internet polling for the Wall Street Journal ahead of the 2006 midterm elections, Zogby found Bob Beauprez narrowly ahead, though within the margin of error, in the Colorado Governor's race, a race that Beauprez actually lost by 15 points. Similarly, Zogby put Republican Mark Green up, though within the margin of error, in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race, which Democrat Jim Doyle won by 8 points. On the Senate side, Zogby pegged Democrat Sherrod Brown's lead over Republican Mike DeWine at 1.4 points where Brown ended up actually winning by 12 points. The list goes on. Suffice it to say, the results of Zogby's internet polling in 2006 just did not consistently jibe with other polling or the eventual results.
But that's not all. Late last month The Washington Post and ABC NEWS polled almost this exact question and came up with distinctly different results. According to this earlier survey, just 41 percent of respondents indicated that they definitely would not consider voting for Clinton were she the Democratic nominee -- a proportion significantly lower than that found by Zogby and, perhaps even more importantly, one much lower than the 57 percent figure for Mitt Romney and the 54 percent figure for Fred Thompson.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/10/22/122914/95
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