DOI: 10.3886/icpsr24364
title: CBS News South Carolina Primary Poll, December 2007
title: Archival Version

description: This poll, fielded December 13-17, 2007, is a part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicit public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other political and social issues. All of the respondents to this poll were registered voters from South Carolina. The poll included an oversample of African Americans respondents, for a total of 444 African American registered voters. Respondents were asked whether they approved of the way George W. Bush was handling his job as president. Several questions were asked pertaining to the 2008 presidential campaign and the South Carolina presidential primary including how much attention respondents paid to the presidential campaign, the one issue respondents wanted candidates to discuss during the campaign, whether they thought America was ready to elect a Black president, whether they had attended any campaign events, the likelihood respondents would vote in the primary, whether they would vote in the Democratic or Republican primary, and whether the respondent had ever voted in a primary before. Respondents were asked their opinion of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mike Huckabee. Respondents were queried on which candidate they supported, why they supported that specific candidate, whether they had ever supported a different candidate, which candidate they thought had the best chance of winning, whether they thought the candidates had prepared themselves for the job of president, whether they thought each candidate shared the same values of most people in South Carolina, which candidate they thought would bring change to the way things are done in Washington, and which candidate they thought cared most about the needs and problems of Black people. Respondents were also asked which candidate came closest to their own view on illegal immigration, how important it was that a candidate shared their religious beliefs, whether they would vote for a candidate that did not share their views on social issues, and whether they would vote for a candidate that was of a different race, religion, and gender than their own. Questions about the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton addressed the issues of whether Oprah Winfrey's involvement in Obama's campaign made respondents more likely to support Obama, and whether Bill Clinton's involvement in Hillary Clinton's campaign made respondents more likely to support Hillary Clinton. Information was also collected on whether the respondent considered him or herself to be a born-again Christian, whether there were any labor union members in the household, and whether the respondent or any member of the respondent's family served in the armed forces in Iraq. Additional topics in this poll included illegal immigration, Social Security, United States involvement in Iraq, terrorism, and abortion. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, education level, household income, marital status, religious preference, frequency of religious attendance, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, voter registration status and participation history, the presence of children under 18, and labor union member status.
description: The data contain weight variables that should be used in analyzing the data. According to the CBS News Web site, data were weighted by probabilities of selection and by demographic characteristics to reflect the South Carolina registered voter list. To create the probable electorate, registered voters were also weighted by their intention of voting, their attention to the campaign, and their past voting behavior.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: telephone interview 
The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis.
 Selected respondents from this poll were re-interviewed January 23-24, 2008, a few days prior to the South Carolina Democratic primary, in the CBS NEWS SOUTH CAROLINA PRIMARY CALL-BACK POLL, JANUARY 2008 (ICPSR 26141). 
The CASEID variable was reformatted in order to make it a unique identifier.
Variable Q9 contains an unknown code.
This data collection was produced by CBS News, New York, NY.
description: Persons aged 18 and over living in households with telephones in the state of South Carolina.
description: This poll was conducted among a South Carolina statewide random sample of 1,319 registered voters, including an oversample of African American voters. There are 599 likely Democratic Primary voters and 447 likely Republican Primary voters. The sample was drawn from two sources: records on the state of South Carolina's registered voter list for which phone numbers were available, and a statewide RDD phone sample. Numbers dialed from the RDD sample were only those not among the numbers available for records on the registered voter list. A variation of random-digit dialing using primary sampling units (PSUs) was employed, consisting of blocks of 100 telephone numbers identical through the eighth digit and stratified by geographic region, area code, and size of place. Within households, respondents were selected using a method developed by Leslie Kish and modified by Charles Backstrom and Gerald Hursh (see Backstrom and Hursh, SURVEY RESEARCH. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963).