Newsweak Poll Guarantees the Results They Want to See

Newsweak magazine is pushing their new poll as a sign of a coming GOP calamity:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half of Americans, 55 percent, would like to see Democrats take control of Congress, according to a poll by Newsweek magazine released on Saturday.

The poll of 1,000 likely voters found that 55 percent would choose a Democrat to represent their district if the vote were held now, and 37 percent said they would vote Republican.

This includes 31 percent of white evangelical Christians, an increase of 6 points among that strongly Republican group over the 2004 elections.

However, these articles never give you the internals of the poll which are critical to determining just how accurate a poll might be. Do you think a poll that included 28% Republicans and 35% Democrats might tend to favor Dems? Of course it would, and according to K-Lo at National Review, that's the makeup of this poll.

You can't help but think that the only purpose in publishing a poll like this is to buck up the Dems and depress the GOP and evangelical Christian vote. If Republican voters show up at the polls in the same percentages used in this poll, then certainly the Dems will have a big victory, but that's not at all likely. The GOP has a get-out-the-vote mechanism that the Dems can only dream of, and there's not much chance that 25% more Dems will vote than Republicans.