Why You Should Never Believe The Stats You Hear From The Media

Jeremy Monteith:

I didn't get to hear much of what was said last night in the President's speech on Health Care, as I was driving back from Iowa. As I did some reading about it on various "news" sites, I found this.

CNN Poll: Double-digit post-speech jump for Obama plan

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Two out of three Americans who watched President Barack Obama's health care reform speech Wednesday night favor his health care plans — a 14-point gain among speech-watchers, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national poll of people who tuned into Obama's address Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress.

Wow! 2 out of every 3 Americans who watched are on board with Obama's health care plans. That doesn't really seem right since I have been hearing how a little over over half of the nation does not support it. So I kept reading on and eventually at the very end of the article I found the following, AFTER many more figures were thrown out there about how the country is overwhelmingly in favor of Obama's plan.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted just before and just after the president's speech, with 427 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

The sample of speech-watchers in this poll was 45 percent Democratic and 18 percent Republican. Our best estimate of the number of Democrats in the voting age population as a whole indicates that the sample is about 8-10 points more Democratic than the population as a whole.