A Bit on Polling (or, Why the Media Thinks You’re a Moron)

Remember how how incredibly tight the 1980 election was? How Ronald Reagan managed to edge Jimmy Carter at the last minute despite losing Texas and New York?

Probably not, mainly because that didn’t happen. But as Jeffrey Lord’s story makes clear, that was the narrative the New York Times was pushing most of the fall, and they had “polls” to back it up.

In the pantheon of lies, damn lies, and statistics, polls aren’t even as valid as statistics. At this point, polls by the usual MSM suspects (NYT, PPP, CBS, MS/NBC, Time, Newsweek, NPR, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, just to name a few) aren’t designed to gauge the race, they’re designed to encourage Democrats and discourage Republicans. They are, as Lord notes and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee admitted to Ed Rollins, offering up “in kind contributions” to the Democrats.

So let’s take a brief look at the many ways in which the MSM is distorting polls for the benefit of Obama and the Democrats.

  • Dick Morris (who knows a thing or two about polling) thinks the idea that an Obama victory is in the offing is bunk. “All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.” He also notes that even the skewed polls show Obama at less than 50%, and “the undecided vote always goes against the incumbent.”
  • By one analysis, pollsters are oversampling Democrats by an average of 6.1%.
  • More evidence that the media is oversampling Democrats.
  • A technical analysis of how that dynamic applies to Pennsylvania.
  • Jay Cost notes that “polls that do a poor job of differentiating enthusiastic non-voters from enthusiastic voters are going to overestimate Obama’s margin.”

    • Every week you see the media going to bat for Obama, and every week we see more evidence of lack of enthusiasm on the part of Democrats compared to 2008. 2010 did happen, no matter how much the media would like to pretend it didn’t. The Tea Party hasn’t gone away, nor suddenly decided that they like Obama’s free-spending ways after all. The fundamentals of our ailing economy and staggering unemployment haven’t gone away either. And remember: Republicans now outnumber Democrats in party identification.

    There’s a lot better chance that this election’s results will look like 1980 than that they will look like 2008.

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 at 9:19 PM and is filed under Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    One Response to “A Bit on Polling (or, Why the Media Thinks You’re a Moron)”

    1. The New York Times Really Does Think You’re a Moron « Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog says:
      September 26, 2012 at 10:02 AM

      […] Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog Attacking so fast they won't know what hit them… « A Bit on Polling (or, Why the Media Thinks You’re a Moron) […]

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