Post's Cohen on Iran Polls
Mark Blumenthal | June 15, 2009
Topics: Iran
Today's Washington Post features an op-ed by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty that cites a "scientific" survey they helped conduct of the Iranian people "from across all 30 of Iran's provinces [that] showed [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad well ahead." Ballen and Doherty argue that rather than indicating "fraud and electoral manipulation...The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted."
This morning, Washington Post polling director Jon Cohen blogged a helpful reality check:
[A] closer look at the one sponsored by Terror Free Tomorrow and the New America Foundation [cited by Ballen and Doherty] reveals ample reason to be skeptical the conclusions drawn from it.
Methodologically, this survey passes muster as it's relatively straightforward to pull a good sample of the Iranian population, using the country's publicly available population counts and listed telephone exchanges. But the poll was conducted from May 11 to 20, well before the spike in support for Mousavi his supporters claim.
(See here for a summary of available Iran polls that finds some evidence for Mousavi momentum late in the campaign.)
More to the point, however, the poll that appears in today's op-ed shows a 2 to 1 lead in the thinnest sense: 34 percent of those polled said they'd vote for Ahmadinejad, 14 percent for Mousavi. That leaves 52 percent unaccounted for. In all, 27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Six percent said they'd vote for none of the listed candidates; the rest for minor candidates.
The whole thing is worth reading in full.
Update: Gary Langer, polling director of ABC News, covers much of the same ground, but catches that Terror Free Tomorrow's pre-election analysis "predicted a runoff":
To declare Ahmadinejad comfortably ahead based on these data is to assume that the people who did not express a preference divided precisely the same as those who did answer the question. This theoretical calculation produces a majority for the incumbent. The question is whether such a calculation is justified - and the reality is that even TFT did not make this leap in its pre-election analysis.
Rather it leaped in another direction, noting that "the race may actually be closer than a first look at the numbers would indicate," because more than six in 10 respondents who expressed no opinion "reflect individuals who favor political reform and change in the current system." It went on to predict "that none of the candidates will likely pass the 50 percent threshold."
Juan Cole makes a similar point and links to the original Terror Free Tomorrow report (pdf).
By Mark Blumenthal | June 15, 2009 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
