Yesterday, a friend of mine who doesn't usually follow such things sent me a link to the Reuters article about the Zogby interactive poll that found, as its headline announced: "New Poll Shows Clinton Trails Top 2008 Republicans." While I was aware of the poll, that was the first time I'd realized how mainstream it had gone. It was one of the top news headlines on the Yahoo homepage while the more conventional and more credible Gallup poll, which showed the exact opposite results, was nowhere to be found.

Greg Sargent has more on this disparity.

The Zogby survey was covered repeatedly on CNN, earned coverage from MSNBC, Fox News, and Reuters and was covered by multiple other smaller outlets.

By contrast, I can't find a single example of any reporter or commentator on the major networks or news outlets referring to the Gallup poll at all, with the lone exception of UPI. While the Zogby poll was mentioned by multiple reporters and pundits, the only mentions the Gallup poll got on TV were from Hillary advisers who had to bring it up themselves on the air in order to inject it into the conversation.

Hillary Clinton's Fact Hub was on it as well:

As of about 9AM, the Zogby poll was covered on TV news 15 times and the Gallup poll was mentioned twice - by the Hillary campaign's Mark Penn and Ann Lewis.

Why is this? Doesn't really take a rocket scientist. As Pollster's Charles Franklin notes, it's about framing, stupid.

The Reuters story...uses the theme that Clinton is declining to frame these Zogby results:

The results come as other national polls show the race for the Democratic nomination tightening five weeks before the first contest in Iowa, which kicks off the state-by-state nomination battles in each party.

Some Democrats have expressed concerns about the former first lady's electability in a race against Republicans. The survey showed Clinton not performing as well as Obama and Edwards among independents and younger voters, pollster John Zogby said.

Ah, the ole "Some Democrats" trick. Yes, the media had its new storyline and had found just the poll to back it up. The larger problem was that, as with the ABC News/WaPo Iowa poll over the previous week, the coverage would repeatedly fail to note that the findings in the poll were aberrant. Franklin continues.

While [Clinton falling] is certainly a theme of recent reporting, boosted by a pre-Thanksgiving ABC/WP poll showing Obama leading Clinton in Iowa, it is striking that no other poll has found recent results as far from the trend estimates as are Zogby's results and that the Reuters story fails to note that fact.

So, how far off are the Zogby numbers from Clinton's trend estimates?

...the Zogby poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton losing to all four top Republicans in head-to-head trial heats. What makes that surprising is that Clinton LEADS all four of those Republicans in the trend estimates based on all other polling by between 3.8 and 11.6 points. [...]

...the Zogby Clinton numbers are well below the estimated trend for Clinton in each of the four comparisons. Clinton is consistently 8-10 points below her trend estimate.

One of the more puzzling things for Franklin is that while Clinton is below her trend estimates, the support Zogby found for Barack Obama was not below his, therefore Franklin rules out an anti-Democratic bias within the poll to explain the Clinton results. Likewise, because the Republicans' numbers against Clinton are consistent with their trend estimates, he rules out yet another conclusion.

We can probably rule out one easy explanation: That Clinton has suddenly collapsed and Zogby is just the first to find it. The reason is internal to the Zogby result. If Clinton really has suddenly become 10 points less attractive, we'd expect all four Republicans paired against her to do BETTER than their trend estimates when facing her. But what happens is Clinton goes down and they don't do any better. That is hard to reconcile with a real change in Clinton's support.

So how to explain it? As you might expect, Franklin has a theory, which gets to the heart of the inherent problem with an Internet poll methodology, namely that respondents are by definition not a random sample by virtue of the fact that they needed to have taken the active step of volunteering to take part in an Internet survey.

Clinton has more support among women and somewhat older people. Both those groups are likely to be underrepresented in any pool of internet respondents. As a result the responses of those with these characteristics who ARE present in the sample are likely to be weighted up quite a bit to reach population proportions in the weighted sample. If the relatively few older women who are in the sample are ALSO atypical in other ways that both make them volunteer for internet surveys AND be less disposed to support Clinton than are non-internet volunteering older women, then weighting these respondents up won't properly capture Clinton's support and will lead to a systematic underestimate of her support.

I highly recommend reading the whole piece. Franklin concludes that while there are issues with the methodology that lead to the aberrant results found in the Zogby Interactive poll, ultimately the media needs to do a better job of contextualizing the results of polls and exercising more restraint in drawing blaring headline conclusions without full analysis. I couldn't agree more.