Monday, May 1 2006

Margin of what?

Trying to prove... I'm not exactly sure what, in today's Grapevine, Jim Angle (Brit Hume's Friday understudy) makes a pretty stunning claim:

For New York Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton the chances of becoming president could be influenced by what name she uses, according to a new USA Today poll.

When Republicans were asked about Hillary Rodham Clinton, they gave her a 23 percent approval rating, but the other half of the Republicans in the poll were asked what they thought about Hillary Clinton, without her maiden name and they only gave her a 16 percent approval rating.

And among Independents the inclusion of her maiden name produced a 48 percent rating compared to a 42 percent rating without it.

Democrats, however, were swayed in the opposite direction with the maiden name inspiring a 1 percent decrease in her approval rating from 77 to 76 percent.

As I said before, I'm not sure exactly what Angle was suggesting with that last point (love of the Clinton name among Democrats? A "traditional marriage" streak among leftists?) but it's simply ridiculous to come to the conclusion that Angle draws based on a 1% variation in a poll with a margin of error of 3-5%. The only intellectually honest conclusion to be drawn from the numbers is that unlike Republicans or independents, Democrats don't care what name Clinton uses.