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NewswireToday - /newswire/ -
Greenwich, CT, United States, 10/05/2006 - Phil Maymin predicted that polls for his race would be statistically invalid if they failed to include him, and that prediction has proven true. The first two polls were released this week and flatly contradicted each other because they excluded him.
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Libertarian Congressional candidate Phil Maymin predicted that polls for his race for U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut’s fourth district would be statistically invalid if they failed to include him, and that prediction has proven true. The first two polls for the race were released this week and because neither one included Maymin as an option alongside incumbent Republican Christopher Shays and Democrat Diane Farrell, their results flatly contradicted each other.
Maymin (mayminforcongress.com) issued a press release after the first poll, sponsored by the Stamford Advocate/Greenwich Time and conducted by the University of Connecticut’s Center for Survey Research, which showed Shays leading Farrell by four percentage points. In it, he explained why polls that do not offer Maymin as an explicit option are statistically invalid.
Just one day later, Reuters released a poll conducted by Zogby International, which also failed to include Maymin as an explicit option. The results were exactly opposite, showing Farrell leading Shays by five percentage points.
“Why the discrepancy? It’s because they conducted the poll incorrectly,” said Maymin. “Other measures of voter support which are done accurately show me with approximately ten percent support.”
One example is the Election Pulse of Facebook.com. The wildly popular social networking site had Shays with 48 percent, Farrell with 42 percent, and Maymin with 9 percent as of yesterday. It only reports results for voters with a preference, and not those who are undecided. Contrary to popular misconception and unlike other online polls, the Facebook.com results are not obtained by people voting multiple times. Each registered user can only support a candidate once.
“In the first invalid poll, Shays led by four percent. In the second invalid poll, Farrell led by five percent. It’s as if there’s nine percent unaccounted for. Those are my nine percent, being distributed randomly among the other candidates,” said Maymin.
In addition to the explicit support of nine percent, Maymin said, many voters are either undecided or not strongly committed to either Shays or Farrell.
“Forty percent of registered voters are unaffiliated with either of the two reigning parties,” said Maymin. “Thirty percent are registered Democrats and thirty percent are registered Republicans. Even of those, many people still vote for the best candidate regardless of party affiliation. My true support could be much greater but it would take a statistically valid poll that lists me as an explicit option to confirm it.”
Maymin said that internal polls conducted by his campaign bear out the results of Facebook.com, showing him with approximately ten percent of support as of last week. Yesterday marked the first debate among the three candidates and Maymin’s support probably increased. Audience response was strongest following Maymin’s answers to questions ranging from Iraq to the Foley scandal to transportation.
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campaign[.]mayminforcongress.com 
