33 thoughts on “Media Madness”

  1. There’s a truck in town with a bumper sticker that could work for many politicians. It says: “Does this ass make my truck look bigger?” with a picture of Obama.

  2. I’m an amateur historian, and I’ve always found the 1980 race interesting. The polls showed Reagan clearly BEHIND for much of it, just an occasional tiny lead here and there.

    The excuse for not seeing the landslide coming was that the undecideds broke for the challenger. However, Reagan scored a 10 point win over Carter. The number of undecideds in the final polls was around 4% – not enough to explain Reagan’s win, unless he carried well in excess of 100% of them.

    Another thing to bear in mind about polls: bias. I’m not talking political bias here, though that’s probably a factor in some. I’m talking the biggest bias of all; the pollster’s wallets. Polling is what they do for a living, so they prefer to do more of it. In a close race, you see far more demand for polls. So, it is in their strong financial interest to show a close race most of the time. This changes in the final days, when accuracy becomes an issue for them (they don’t want to be widely off the mark, as that would hit future business). However, the only real test for posters is election day, so right now, they are free to poll as they see fit, with no fear.

    I also recall the exit polls (theoretically by far the most accurate of polling methods) that showed a Kerry win in 2004, and Scott Walker going down to defeat a few months ago.

    If a poll shows its internals and methodology in detail, I give it a serous look, but still take it with a lost of skepticism. If not, I ignore it utterly.

  4. Most of the published polls are of voting age adults or, at best, registered voters – neither being sample populations that provide much useful guidance to actual election outcomes. Most polls also oversample Democrats by as much as 15 percentage points. Even then, Obama is only shown to (apparently) have a slim lead. But I don’t think the pollsters are cooking the books on their own initiative to keep interest up with the illusion of a tight race. I think they’re producing exactly what the left-leaning media outlets that sign their checks tell them they want – polls that show Obama in front. The pollsters are perfectly capable of running real polls with statistically reasonable results and they do. But the people who pay for this real polling keep the results close to their vests. The Democrats and most of the media keep the real numbers secret to preserve the carefully crafted illusion of Obamian popularity and inevitability. The Republicans also have good numbers but keep them to themselves to keep their ground troops worried enough to stay sharp and produce a maximum effort up through election day. Nobody who pays for polls has an interest in letting the real numbers out of the bag until the actual election renders further secrecy superfluous. Romney-Ryan will win by 8 – 12 percentage points and the Republicans will take the Senate, gaining a minimum of six seats.

    1. I agree with the oversampling. I think many don’t want to believe things like this:

      To be precise, 37.6% now think of themselves as Republicans — more than in September, 2004 — and only 33.3% self-identify as Democrats.

      More here; you can see a near reversal from September 2008. Considering the enthusiasm to elect our first black President and lack of support for McCain; Obama’s winning margin doesn’t seem all that big. Now there is lackluster support for Obama and an united backing of Romney.

      Just don’t get cocky; and pay attention to the Senate races.

      1. Don’t get cocky, indeed.

        As I’ve noted before, if President Romney just implements public policy as handed-down from Harvard, what’s the difference? All you’ve done is move the Overton Window to the left — something that wouldn’t have happened had Obama continued to take up space in the big chair.

      2. The poll suggests overall a shift to the right. Yeah, I’m hoping that is less for Romney and more from the observations that statist policy objectives are failing miserably. However, I think there is something to that hope.

    2. Nobody who pays for polls has an interest in letting the real numbers out of the bag until the actual election renders further secrecy superfluous

      After an election pollsters can be evaluated for the accuracy of their polling (e.g. this post-mortem of 2010 polling). Pollsters who are consistently wrong in one direction will see their future work discounted or treated as biased.

  5. IIRC, back in 2004 some media big-wig bragged about how the Press was worth 10-15 percentage points for the Democrats. I think that’s the only reason why the polls are close for Obama. If the Press treated him like they do Republicans, he’d be lucky to poll at 30%.

    Then again, pollsters can only get answers from those who’ll answer the phone. And they don’t know if the people they’re talking to are telling them the truth about their opinions. Why would anyone tell a stranger on the phone to they plan to vote for? Even if they do make their living at it, it’s none of their business.

    1. Nice house! I was the Honolulu Advertiser (RIP) paperboy for that street in the late 70s (i.e. before that house was built). The beach is fantastic, one of the best in the world.

      As for the story, I’d be very surprised if the Obama’s left Chicago after his presidency, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they bought a vacation home in Hawaii. Lots of us who grew up there would love to have one to go back to for visits.

      But “politically useful”? Hawaii is the last place to go if you want to influence U.S. politics.

      1. I think the point that Chicago got the Obama’s as far as they can go and is no longer politically useful, so they might as well retire to a place that doesn’t have those wonderful Chicago winters. A former president can be influential just about anywhere he/she hangs his/her hat.

  7. ” Zero and company, knowing they’re going down the crapper, are shopping for a post-administration home in Hawaii”

    What about Guam…….I hear Guam is very nice.

    They cannot get too far away…..

  9. There ARE those of us who screw with the polls when the (D) pollsters call. I’m a huge fan of the current Administration. On the phone that is!

    I also always wonder how many Obumble ‘supporters’ or (D) supporters in general don’t vote, or can’t vote, but get counted in the polls by MSNBC / ABC / NYT’s polls. I wonder because I periodically see two guys my sons went to HS with with, driving cars sporting Obama stickers, and I know neither of them CAN vote now.

    And how many ‘likely’ voters won’t go to the polls and never do, regardless of what they tell the pollsters, on the phone.

    1. “and I know neither of them CAN vote now. “

      Of course, you meant “Neither should be able to vote in a sane world where trivial efforts in preventing ‘just’ voter registration fraud translate into a solid prevention of vote fraud.”

          2. Photo ID laws have no effect on ineligible voters voting under their own names.

            If John Q. Public is registered to vote, and then becomes ineligible (e.g. by committing a felony), he can still show up at the polls with valid photo ID that proves he is John Q. Public. The photo ID requirement won’t keep him from voting.

            To keep ineligible voters from voting you need a process that removes them from the voter rolls, without removing voters who might share a name and/or address with an ineligible voter. That is anything but a trivial effort, because individuals do not have stable, unique identifiers that can be used to link records in voter and law enforcement databases.

          3. Gee, I wonder why minority voter turnout might have increased after 2006?

            The key question when evaluating any policy is “compared to what?” What would minority voter turnout have been without the Georgia voter ID law?

            Since 2008 1,586 voters in Georgia had their votes discarded because they did not have ID, and did not come back with it. Either every single one of them was trying to commit felony voter impersonation fraud, or some legitimate votes were suppressed by the law. And there’s no telling how many people didn’t even bother to go to the polls because they knew they’d be turned away for lack of ID.

          4. More to the point, purging voter rolls of felons. (I assume. It’s not likely that those two had their citizenships revoked.)

  10. “I don’t buy the polls” is a great example of motivated reasoning. If polls showed Obama headed to landslide defeat there’d be no skepticism here about their validity. But because you don’t like their results, the whole industry of political polling is suspect.

    I think that we’re going to see a huge preference cascade

    Haven’t you been expecting that since mid-2008? At this point voters have a pretty good idea what they think of Obama; that isn’t going to suddenly change. Romney is less well known and so opinions of Romney are more malleable, but it appears that the GOP made little of their opportunity to move those views in a pro-Romney direction at the convention.

    If the election was held tomorrow, Obama would win (and the Dems would lose the Senate). So Romney has two months to come from behind. He will outspend Obama and hope for a debate knock-out, but otherwise he needs an external event, like a European economic crisis, to really move voters’ opinions.

    2. Actually Jim, the RCP average has Obama up by a mere tenth of a point. This is an average that is skewed by RV and Dem heavy samples and ignores how the undecideds heavily break to the challenger.

      If the Election were held today considering that data, Romney would win in a walk.

          2. ““Oversampled” = polls you don’t agree with.”

            Jim, do you think the electorate will be D+9, as one recent poll was? If not, can you come up with an alternate explanation?

  12. Since people are discussing polls, here’s one from The Hill. Take it for what it’s worth:

    Fifty-two percent of centrists said Obama does not deserve reelection based on his job performance, 56 percent are unsatisfied with his handling of the economy and 53 percent feel the country is worse off.

    Men (57 percent) are more likely than women (51 percent) to believe Obama does not deserve reelection.

    The poll found sharp partisan differences in views about Obama. While 78 percent of Democrats believe the president deserves reelection, 1 in 5 do not believe he should get a second term. A poll for The Hill in early July also found 1 in 5 Democrats feel Obama has changed the nation for the worse as president. Eighty percent of Republicans believe Obama doesn’t deserve reelection, and only 11 percent think he does.

    Among “other” voters — those who said they were neither Democrats nor Republicans — 61 percent say Obama does not deserve reelection.

    The Obama campaign’s challenges extend to voters of all ages.

    Among those aged 18-39 — a voting bloc that helped push Obama to victory in 2008 — 51 percent said the president does not deserve reelection, while 40 percent said he does.

    Anti-Obama sentiment is strongest among seniors, the poll found. Sixty-five percent of voters aged 65 and over said Obama shouldn’t get a second term, while 53 percent of voters 40-64 years old feel the same.

    Obama is also facing stiff headwinds on the economy among lower-middle-class and middle-class voters.

    Among voters earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year, 67 percent said they were not satisfied with the president’s handling of the economy and 62 percent said the country is in worse condition now than in 2008.

    Similarly, 58 percent of people earning between $20,000 and $40,000 a year said the country is worse off now, and 66 percent are unhappy with his handling of the economy.

    The Hill’s poll’s sample included 51 percent women and 49 percent men. It had a slightly larger sample of Republicans — 36 percent — than Democrats, 34 percent.

    Thirty percent of those polled identified themselves as being neither Democrat nor Republican.

Comments are closed.