Akkam’s Razor

The Mystery Pollster goes the opposite way that I did regarding the disclosure of party identity in polls and surveys.

Disclosing the breakdown and sample weighting lends transparency and legitimacy. He goes further to state that weighing samples to political identity is a bad idea, and prevalent, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that there is no substantive material to base those weights on. He goes on further to state that we should only weight numbers on that which we know.

Finally, my choice, and the choice of most the major media polls, is to weight by factors that we know are real, such as age, gender, region, education, number of adults in household, number of voice phone lines, etc. While you can argue about the reliability of Census data, I’ll place my bets with the Census rather than party ID.