Here it is early on the night of Super-Duper-Pooper Tuesday, and I’ve already heard the word "presumptive" too many times. Can’t these networks afford a thesaurus?
Sure, I like what the word means — when applied to McCain — but enough is enough.
How about, instead of "John McCain, presumptive…" they were to say, "John McCain, by the grace of God…"
True, the connotation does change. The denotation too, I suppose. But it has a ring to it.
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My concern is that the MSM are calling some winners with less than 20% votes counted. I know it can be done if there’s a landslide for 1 but as the votes come in, there doesn’t seem to be validation there.
CNN projected McCain in NY after an exit poll of 600 people.
That’s right. And here’s the key question: Was the poll right?
In a standard phone poll, 600 gives you about a 4 percent margin of error — which means that 95 percent of the time, the result you’d get from the entire population voting would be no more than 4 points higher or lower than what your poll found. The margin of error increases for subsets.
I don’t know whether the formula works the same way for exit polls, but 600 is not all that bad a number, I’m supposing. It depends, of course, on how well you set up your sampling — just as a phone poll depends on a properly constituted random sample.