Posted on 05/17/2012 10:59:36 AM PDT by Kaslin
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Fox News came out with their poll yesterday -- has Obama up. Dick Morris went on Fox and said the Fox poll is wrong. Dick Morris said the Fox poll is full of it. Here. I have that sound bite, too.
I'm a powerful, influential member of the media, I got an advance copy of the Fox poll, and it shows Obama up with women like, I forget, 15 points, and Obama up over Romney by ten? So last night, O'Reilly had Dick Morris on. Question: "If the election were held today, 46 for Obama, 39 Romney, at seven points. And then the women is ten. The margin in women that Obama has is ten. And O'Reilly says, "I asked the Fox News people about this, and they said at this point because it's six months away, they want to get the mood of the country, and they went registered voters rather than likely voters. It's a bigger tent." Here's Morris' reply.
MORRIS: It generally doesn't make sense to do a survey where 40% of the people you are interviewing are not going to vote. There is a real purpose to surveying adults, registered voters. If you want to know how the election is going to come out, don't pay attention to that.
RUSH: Well, so Dick Morris has basically told the Fox audience to pay no attention to the Fox poll. Because it's of registered voters, not likely voters, and that means the sample is made up of 40% of people who are not gonna vote. So Morris wasn't through. He had a little bit more to say.
MORRIS: I did a poll. Six thousand interviews with likely voters from May 5th to May 11th, and margin of error less than half of 1%. Every one of them a likely voter. I have Obama behind Romney 52 to 42.
RUSH: So Dick Morris goes on O'Reilly and debunks the Fox poll and touts his own. By the way, the Fox poll is the only one out there -- even the New York Times/CBS, ABC/Washington Post, NBC/Wall Street Journal, the Fox poll is the only one that has Obama up. Morris was clear.
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Morris is a double agent. Don’t trust anything he says.
Any competent statistician (and even a student who makes at least a C in his college statistics course!) should be able to tell you that on average, approximately one out of every twenty surveys MUST fall outside of the so-called margin of error -- a/k/a two sigma.
Therefore, Fox's current survey is merely the expected "exception that proves the rule." Case closed.
Dick Morris is like Politico. Both should be taken with some grain of salt
Morris nailed it in 2010. I think he's also on to it this year.
Late Night TV wants Obama. They drill Romney in joke after joke. Stupid people watch those shows to get their knowledge... or lack of. I know Hollywood is out in full force to get Obama elected. Polls are all over the place. They will be up and down for both. I don’t think it is a win for either at this point. It is going to be a close maybe the closest in history. It shouldn’t be close at all and we could have Bozo the Clown running and SHOULD be able to beat him but... they will steal beg and cheat to win at all costs. After all they have all the MSM behind the Obama machine.
Therefore, Fox’s current survey is merely the expected “exception that proves the rule.” Case closed.
...did you ever wonder where the phrase ‘the exception that proves the rule’ came from? I mean, does it even make any sense at all? If a rule is established, based on observed and stable occurences, how then exactly does an exception prove that established rule? If anything, it would call it into question, would it not?
...I think the word ‘prove’ in this instance refers to testing, or ‘probing’, so as to trip someone up...at least that makes literal sense...
...funny how languages and their eccentricities befuddle, rather than clarify...
The expression comes from the practice of "proofing" weapons and armor. They would proof armor by firing a bullet at it; if it passed the test it was "bulletproof." An exception that "proves" the rule tests the rule.
It is going to be a close maybe the closest in history.
...disagree...I don’t think it will be close at all, as Romney has no margin for error at all, and his winning scenarii are daunting at best...impossible at worst.
...in every scenario, Romney needs to win Florida, and in all others except one, he needs to win Ohio and Virginia as well...assuming the whole time he doesn’t somehow lose North Carolina...
...I don’t see Romney getting any more than in the vicinity of 220 or so EV’s...too bad too because he’s clearly superior to Obama...
If it’s close, Obama’s people will steal it.
They would proof armor by firing a bullet at it; if it passed the test it was “bulletproof.” An exception that “proves” the rule tests the rule...
...interesting, didn’t know the phrase’s derivation...seems to be a classic case of semantic misuse...certainly most people believe that, as the phrase is commonly used, an exception testifies to the veracity of the ‘rule’ under question, wehn in fact no such thing at all is true...
...after all, a faulty armor pierced by a bullet hardly ‘proves’ the value of the other sets of armor in the batch, fired on already or not...
>> did you ever wonder where the phrase ‘the exception that proves the rule’ came from? <<
Absolutely. An excellent question. I have wondered about it many times. And I agree with you that most of the time, it doesn’t make sense.
But on the other hand, when we stray into the realm of mathematical statistics, it fits well. Makes total sense.
More to the point:
When the popular press refers to the “margin of error” for a survey or poll, the mathematically trained student of statistics should know to assign a specific meaning — that is, “the region under the bell curve that’s within two standard deviations of the expected value.”
For the layman, this gobbledy-gook may be interpreted to say that about one out of every twenty surveys are FULLY EXPECTED to be wrong. In other words, the very “rule” itself tells us there will be a certain percentage of “exceptions.”
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