Moving away from all of the convention hype, CNN
now lists North Carolina as a toss-up state. That's quite a surprise, because even though Barack Obama somehow carried North Carolina in the 2008 election, the
state recently voted to ban gay marriage. So while they disagree with Obama's social stances, apparently many of them are still willing to vote for him. It should add a little excitement to the November election, because now a significant number of states could swing either way. What do you think? Is this a surprising development?
Also, for a more in-depth analysis of last night's speeches, rather than a summary, I suggest reading CNN's comments
here.
Edit: It has come to my attention that North Carolina's designation as a "toss-up" was the result of a single survey with only 2,000 participants, so it may be wise to take this with a grain of salt. (Credit goes to Sally Hosokawa--thanks!)
4 comments:
Interesting, it looks like North Carolina has decided to shake things up. The question is, how important will social issues be in the upcoming election? I feel like most of the debate will be concerning the economy, and that will play abigger part in influencing North Carolinian voting decisions.
I looked at the official poll that prompted this change on CNN's Electoral Map and was surprised to see that only a little over 2,000 people had participated in the poll.
The poll claims that the margin of sampling error is only 3 percent, and I admit that I have a limited amount of knowledge in statistics, so extrapolating data to such an extent might be typical of polls like these. However, using 2,000 people to predict the beliefs of 10 million North Carolinians just doesn't seem like it would provide extremely accurate results. I wonder if the status of all other states on CNN's map are based off of similar polls with similar sample sizes as well...
Thank you for the information Sally! That's unfortunate, though I suppose it's my own fault for not looking more closely at the sampling size. However, I do think the majority of CNN's states are based on previous election polling. After all, most line up as we would expect them to.
It's a little surprising how CNN can claim to only have a 3 percent margin of error unless they were sure to get a wide sample of various groups, but with such a small poll size that seems unlikely. I'll update the post accordingly.
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