oops

firstly - thanks for those of you who have helped out here sending stuff in re this post

I heard back from Zogby - here is what they had to say:
"The Houston Chronicle online article included a link with the entire results to the polls. The two different numbers that being reported are both correct, but from different questions. The 45% (q6) is from the question asking, "If the election for Congress were held today for and the candidates where Republican Tom DeLay and someone else whom would you vote?" and the 49% (q10) is from the question asking, "Do you think Tom DeLay deserves to be re-elected or do you think it is time for someone new?". The difference is small and within the margin of error, but the change is likely due to the fact that while some people would think it should be someone elses turn, they are satisified enough with Tom DeLay to vote for him if he were on the ballot."

I must admit (sheepishly) that i hadnt seen the actual questionnaire - i didnt notice the link on the Chron site, and i'd been looking for the results at zogby.com but it seems that the results hadnt been posted there.

The actual quote from the original Chron article was:
"Yet 49 percent said they would vote for someone other than DeLay if a congressional election in the 22nd District were at hand; 39 percent said they would stick with him."
and the current wording is:
"Yet 45 percent said they would vote for someone other than DeLay if a congressional election in the 22nd District were at hand; 38 percent said they would stick with him."

As you can see, it was actually the original article that was wrong, and the correction they made was legitimate.

It would have been nice if the Chron had noted that they had changed the article.

It would be nice if I had the text from my original email question to Zogby so that I could verify whether they answered my original question accurately or not. I think my question was something like "im seeing both 49% and 45% quoted - which is the correct one?" and their answer was "49%" - so i dont think my interpretation was too unreasonable! it also would have been helpful if they had answered my second email to them. it could have saved us some trouble.

For some reason, if you news.google the phrase "Yet 45 percent said they would vote for someone other than DeLay", it still comes up without any results - so I had assumed that the article had been scrubbed, although in retrospect, it simply seems to tell us something about news.googles processes.

Thanks to everyone who dropped by and/or linked and/or helped . Feel free to have a look around. Theres food in the fridge...

For completeness, here's the Chron article with the mistake that started it all


DeLay has enough trouble without me ;-) Let's hope that he stays around just long enough to bring down the whole dirty bunch, and doesnt do too much damage to the rest of us in the meantime. Given Drudge's recent efforts, it looks like we might soon witness the Mother of All Internecine Battles. get yerself some popcorn.