Polling Strong

In this article on the Southeast Texas Political Review, Philip R. Klein writes:

The Southeast Texas Political Review has conducted two polls in two of the county commissioners races in Southeast Texas. The two polls were conducted over a two week period from January 15 - 29th. There was a total of 102 respondents to the phone poll in both races. The following are the results :

If the election for County Commissioner in your pct. was held today - who would you vote for :

• Mark Domingue: 39%
• Brent Weaver: 43%
• Undecided: 18%

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• Bo Alfred: 41%
• Jamie Smith: 46%
• Undecided: 13%

While most political consultants are familiar with basic statistical analysis and population sampling, Klein again proves that as a political consultant, he's more adept at running Dairy Queens.

As an example, readers will notice that Philip hasn't included the margin of error (MoE or Standard Error). To derive the margin of error, one needs a confidence interval (c).  Here are the formulas:

 

Neither did Klein address whether this was a random sample or a stratified sample. A purely random sample that includes respondents from all precincts in Jefferson County will give distinctly different results from a sample that comes exclusively from Precincts 2 and 4. Given this information, Philip probably conducted his poll in Hardin County.

We're not even sure if Klein's math in figuring percentages is correct. I've repeatedly shown that Philip has a hard time counting past 10 while wearing his shoes. More likely, this poll is as bogus as most of his so-called "statisitics."

Readers may remember this classic when Philip insisted that one of the few callers to his now-defunct radio show "talk educated" about the VX waste that was incinerated in Port Arthur:

This stuff has already been, before it's even been brought here to Southeast Texas, it's already been dissolved to a point where you would need to wallow in it for two years to even get one point of one-tenth of a side effect.

Clear as mud. We'll revisit Philip's "polls" after the primary elections.