The Marquette Poll is even screwier than Mike Flynn of Breitbart suggests.
First of all, it looks like it's a twofer, a questionnaire that covers two topics in one survey. The first part is a horse race survey of Wisconsin, but the second part is all about global warming/climate change.
Maybe because the people behind the global warming part wanted a more representative survey for their purposes, the RV screening is really loose: 94% of those contacted said they were registered to vote and the remainder were asked a follow-up question about whether they they planned to register to vote. All 41 said they did plan to register. This 100% registration compares with about 68% of the voting age population of Wisconsin that was registered to vote in 2010 according to the Statistical Abstract.
So, right away, one suspects that maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the respondents may have lied about their self-reported registration status. Essentially, then, its a poll of adults, not RVs, not a great sample for a horse race survey, but one that works just fine for a global warming/climate change survey. Anyway, of the 705 'registered voters' in the survey, 601 or 85% qualified as likely voters by answering that they were absolutely certain to vote. In 2010, again according to the Statistical Abstract, 70% of registered voters in Wisconsin voted but only 54% of the voting age population did, which is essentially what this sample, per above, represents. So, when the Marquette survey says registered voters, think adults and when it says likely voters, think registered voters plus a bunch of liars (in 2010, only 68% of the voting age population in Wisconsin was registered to vote).
Two of the proofs of the validity of these new definitions is that there was no difference between the registered voter base (54% to 40% for Obama-Biden) and the likely voter base (54% to 39% for Obama-Biden) and that the Party ID results (with leaners) were +11 Democrat.
Besides using a lot of foreplay questions (e.g., what do you think of the Tea Party?), and asking state horse race questions before the presidential horse race question (the 16th question on the survey), the base definitions largely determine the strong outlier results from this survey.
But, heh, I think the global warming/climate change results from the Marquette survey are probably perfectly representative of what Wisconsin adults think on that topic.
