Posted 9:55 PM by Robert

Cocoon With a View

USA TODAY reports:

President Bush leads Sen. John Kerry by 8 percentage points among likely voters, the latest USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows. ... Among all registered voters, Bush's lead widened a bit to a statistically significant 11 points.

Among some observers - especially some cocooning liberal Democrats - Gallup has been a particular target for its party-weighting and turnout procedures, especially its determination of "likely voters." It has been said that the Gallup "likely voter" determination formula assumes too many Republicans will vote - and therefore pulls the poll results sharply to the right.

But this Gallup poll shows Mr. Bush with a substantially bigger and growing lead among registered voters (11%) than he has among Gallup's "likely" voters (8%).

And if that weren't enough to trouble one's comfortable, silk bound metamorphosis, the Washington Post-ABC Poll brings this news:

Bush leads Kerry ... 51 percent to 45 percent among likely voters... In the previous Post-ABC News poll, taken in the week after the Republican National Convention, Bush led Kerry 52 percent to 43 percent among likely voters. Among registered voters, the new poll shows Bush ahead 51 percent to 44 percent... Bush holds a double-digit lead among men (53 percent to 41 percent) and a narrow lead among women (49 percent to 46 percent).

So the good news for Kerry-Edwards is that the gender gap is back and they're on the right side of it. The bad news is that they're trailing among women, too.

How do the liberal cocooners like them apples? Or are they too snugly cocooned to come out, take a tart bite - and enjoy the view?

Kausfiles? Kausfiles? Any word, Kausfiles?

UPDATE: Gallup responds to the cocooned:

Party ID ("In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent?") is not a variable that is measured by the U.S. Census Bureau, is not fixed, and in fact is to a significant degree a measure that is quite likely to change based on the environment. After 9/11, polls showed many more people identifying with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party because citizens were rallying behind the president. This winter during the primary season, polls showed more people identifying with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party because the news coverage was focused almost exclusively on the Democratic primaries. Analyses shows that polls had more identification with the Democrats than Republicans after the Democratic convention this summer, and then more identification with the Republicans than Democrats after the Republican convention. The measure of partisanship we and other pollsters use is not measuring some lifelong fixed value like gender or race. It is an attitudinal identification with one or the other party at the time of the survey. So, if there are forces at work out in the environment that are favorable to the Democratic Party, for example, they will cause more people to identify with the Democratic Party in the survey, and also cause more people to say they will vote for the Democratic candidate. ... This whole issue of partisan identification is one that pollsters and survey scientists have been discussing and dealing with for years in publications and scholarly conferences....