Something’s fishy with Newsweek’s generic ballot poll

So Newsweek may want folks to believe that all is well and that 2010 will not be a bloodbath, but they had to do some serious, and quite possibly dishonest, data manipulation to arrive at that conclusion. Something that Newsweek has done before and that I wrote about in National Review Online in 2008. When I “corrected” Newsweek’s data back in 2008 I showed that their poll reporting an 11 point lead for Barack Obama over John McCain was more like a 4 point lead – guess who was closer to the actual election result (hint: It wasn’t Newsweek then and certainly isn’t Newsweek now).

With reporting like this, it’s easy to see why Newsweek was recently sold for $1 – personally, I think Sydney Harman overpaid.