A major fail by the SST

I am staggered (but not surprised) that the SST devotes its front page to the results of the Horizon poll, despite the fact that its results are miles out of line with every other pollster, and that certain parties and activists openly recruit their supporters to sign up for the Horizon poll, as it is an Internet panel poll.

Even worse, the SST doesn’t even disclose that the Horizon poll is not a phone poll, but an Internet panel poll.

The spreadsheet above compares the Horizon poll to the weighted average of the five main pollsters. The differences are huge and massive. The SST would know this. Yet they still made this poll their front page, without even disclosing the difference in methodology.

Even worse the SST (at least online) doesn’t disclose the actual percentages for the big parties. I assume this is deliberate because they know if they said National is on 35% only, everyone would laugh.

Incidentially the HoS had a poll done this week over four days by Key Research. Their results are National 55.6%, Labour 26.2%, Green 11.3%, NZ First 3.6%. That is pretty close to the other five pollsters, but again shows how vastly different the Horizon results are.