Does anybody know more about YouGov's methodology? On the face of it, I'm suspicious of their very low margin of error which seems substantially better than any other poll out there, but you can't deny that their polling was accurate.
Another thing that looks odd on that graph: the given polling numbers from Washington Times/Politico/Monmouth/Newsmax/Gravis/Fox/CNN/ARG all look identical despite their differing margins of error (which suggests their source data is different). What's going on there?
Thanks for the link. In short, it seems like only poll people they can confirm are actually registered to vote based on the fact that:
"According to US census data, just 71% of eligible Americans are registered to vote. In 2008, almost 90% of those who were registered did vote. So in any poll, it is vital to know which respondents are on the register."
But there're a few more interesting subtleties in there too, so it's worth a read.
YouGov does online polling, which allows them to get very large sample sizes for national polls. I believe they had on the order of 36,000 for their final poll. Compare that to others with just ~1000.
> Another thing that looks odd on that graph: the given polling numbers from Washington Times/Politico/Monmouth/Newsmax/Gravis/Fox/CNN/ARG all look identical despite their differing margins of error (which suggests their source data is different). What's going on there?
I dunno. IIRC, Drew Linzer of Votomatic even worried on his blog that the polling numbers were too close and that pollers might be fudging their numbers to be more similar to each other (which would lead to substantial overconfidence in estimates). Still, the final results seem pretty accurate, so...
Another thing that looks odd on that graph: the given polling numbers from Washington Times/Politico/Monmouth/Newsmax/Gravis/Fox/CNN/ARG all look identical despite their differing margins of error (which suggests their source data is different). What's going on there?