NationStates Jolt Archive

You can see the pdf version of the ad here, (http://www.moveon.org/content/pdfs/Final-Gallup-Ad.pdf) if you wish (assuming you're not one of those right wing nutjobs who thinks Moveon lies about the color of the sky). They make the same point I've been flogging around here about Gallup's shitty polling methodology. I quote:If John Kerry believed in the Gallup poll, he might as well give up.

A couple of weeks ago, a highly publicized Gallup poll of “likely voters” showed
President Bush with a staggering 14-point lead.

But wait a minute. Seven other polls of likely voters were released that same week. On average, they showed Bush with just a three-point lead. No one else came close to Gallup’s figures. And this isn’t the first time the prestigious Gallup survey has been out on a limb with pro-Bush findings.

What’s going on here? It’s not exactly that Gallup’s cooking the books. Rather, they are refusing to fix a longstanding problem with their likely voter methodology.

Simply put, Gallup’s methodology has predicted lately that Republican turnout on Election Day is likely to exceed Democrats’ by six to eight percentage points. But exit polls show otherwise: in each of the last two Presidential elections, Democratic turnout exceeded Republican by four to five points. That discrepancy alone can account for nearly all of Bush’s phantom 14-point lead.

It goes on to note that the biggest problem with Gallup isn't the poll itself, but the fact that two major news organizations, both of which are generally accused by rightwingers of being "liberally biased" (CNN and USA Today), link themselves to this poll publicly and feature it prominently in their newscasts, despite this massive methodological problem. (Liberal media, my ass.)

Why do you suppose Gallup is doing this?
Gallup, who is a devout evangelical Christian, has been quoted as calling his polling “a kind of ministry.” And a few months ago, he said “the most profound purpose of polls is to see how people are responding to God.”

We thought the purpose is to faithfully and factually report public opinion.

And yet the ABCNews/Washington Post Poll has Bush leading that too 51 to 45!

I know as of right now the polls don't matter but to Politicians, they do.

But gee, Zogby has Kerry ahead, proving one thing: polls don't mean diddly before an election.

Appartently you don't understand what a 'poll' is.

A measure of peoples' opinions.

But gee, Zogby has Kerry ahead, proving one thing: polls don't mean diddly before an election.

And I said that. To a politician though, if they are down in most of the Major News Polls, they are not doing their jobs.

Right now, I just follow them to get a trend but that is hard to do so I've since given up.

The only poll that matters is that on Election Day and that poll is the Electoral College.

Yeah, I realize what you said Corneliu. I was just trying to reinforce your point. There are so many flaws with political polling that its just a pointless attempt anymore. For one thing, did anyone know that telephone polling does not include cell phone numbers? There are something like 130 million cell phone numbers in the United States and several households which use only those phones. Without including a representational sample of this group of people, you miss out on a wide portion of the population.

And yet the ABCNews/Washington Post Poll has Bush leading that too 51 to 45!

I know as of right now the polls don't matter but to Politicians, they do.
If you read the text of the ad, you'd see that Moveon noted that Bush currently has a lead nationally--they just argue that it's much smaller than the lead Gallup gives them, and then later explain why that is.

Something else none of the polls of likely voters are getting--no matter who's doing the polls--is the huge number of people who are registering for the first time, especially in swing states. Newsmax, of all places, ran a story about that just recently, noting that the Democrats are outregistering Republicans 2 to 1 in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. They, of course, call this an attempt to steal the election--only Newsmax can use that kind of logic--but they recognize the notion that polls of likely voters won't catch any of these people, and thus the polls could be wildly inaccurate on election day.

And also, Just because they registered does not mean they will vote Incertonia. And they could register one way and vote another. I've seen that done more times than not.