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Where The Polls Were Wrong -- And, Maybe, Why
Townhall.com ^ | November 18, 2014 | Michael Barone

Posted on 11/18/2014 4:03:05 AM PST by Kaslin

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1 posted on 11/18/2014 4:03:06 AM PST by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

I think in general somebody who votes Republican is probably more hesitant to tell strangers who they are voting for; there is no reason to do so.


2 posted on 11/18/2014 4:14:49 AM PST by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action isa economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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To: Kaslin

Good article. I’ve been polled a couple of times when I answer the phone. The problem is that there are so many questions and then clarifying questions, that I get tired of answering and hang up, which may then invalidate my answers to the other questions. Maybe they need to do that because so few people pick up the phone anymore.


3 posted on 11/18/2014 4:14:55 AM PST by perez24 (Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.)
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To: Kaslin

“....rural Republican voters are harder to reach or maybe they’re too grumpy to commit until they have to.”

It’s a good quote. Having grown up in the rural section of America....I’d say that you just don’t if you have a four-star harvest until the last stalk of corn has been gleaned...you’ve added up the expenses...and figure your bottom line for the year.

It’s not that such people are too grumpy to commit until the end....but they keep waiting till every single fake promise has been made, and they’ve finally reached a stage where they add up the bogus promises and figure out which guy might accidentally deliver more than the other.


4 posted on 11/18/2014 4:15:16 AM PST by pepsionice
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To: Kaslin

Maybe Republican voters a little suspicious their responses will be passed along to IRS through the data mining that is rampant. The girls who came into our neighborhood to door-to -door campaign for Democrat state office holders skipped past us , even though I was in my front yard. “They know where you live.”


5 posted on 11/18/2014 4:18:52 AM PST by gusopol3
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To: Kaslin

Polling just serves to manipulate the electorate. The only poll that counts is the tabulation of legal votes on election day. But oh what havoc can be made with “current polls say....” or “the majority of Americans want...” or whatever.

As with homo. marriage. The votes said most people did not favor it. But ever since then all the pollsters tell us they do favor it, and judges actually site that as an excuse to overturn the people. It is an outrage.


6 posted on 11/18/2014 4:23:41 AM PST by The Ghost of FReepers Past (Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light..... Isaiah 5:20)
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To: Kaslin

Or people might lie to pollsters in order to ambush the opposing party…..


7 posted on 11/18/2014 4:51:13 AM PST by txrefugee
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To: Kaslin

How about this as a reason:

Polling with a Democrat voter skew would serve to validate a corrupt election.

Simple, they over estimated (especially in Virginia with new voter ID laws) their ability to vote illegally.


8 posted on 11/18/2014 4:51:47 AM PST by wayoverontheright
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To: Kaslin

Another factor may be people hanging up on pollsters or screening calls and not picking up calls from numbers they don’t know.

Consider the government’s abysmal failure running the do not call registery. My land line and cell phone are inundated with solicitation calls every day. As a result I will not pick up a call from a number I do not know. Legitimate callers will leave a message, robocalls, pollsters, and solicitors move on when voice mail connects.


9 posted on 11/18/2014 4:52:56 AM PST by Soul of the South (Yesterday is gone. Today will be what we make of it.)
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To: gusopol3

That is possible


10 posted on 11/18/2014 4:53:19 AM PST by Kaslin (He needed the ignorant to reelect him, and he got them. Now we all have to pay the consequenses)
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To: Kaslin

When I voted this November I was in a long line of very tense very angry people and the fat Democratic poll watcher could tell it was not going to be a good day


11 posted on 11/18/2014 4:57:18 AM PST by yldstrk (My heroes have always been cowboys)
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To: Kaslin

It is in vogue to say you support Obama at my son’s college; those who can get student loans, are following their dreams in the “arts” and not working towards job training degrees do not grasp the economic implications, thus you could find this same type of non-economic understanding at the root of the polls and vanishing support for the liberalism in general.


12 posted on 11/18/2014 5:03:34 AM PST by Jumper
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To: Soul of the South

I don’t answer calls from numbers that I don’t recognize. I have a specific ringtone on my smart phone numbers that I don’t recognize, but I always do a search for the number and if it is a important number I call it back, most though they leave a voice message. Otherwise it goes in my reject folder. My house phone has a voice ID and announces the number that calls. This way I do not even have to answer the call, but as with calls to my smart phone I do a search for the numbers


13 posted on 11/18/2014 5:06:07 AM PST by Kaslin (He needed the ignorant to reelect him, and he got them. Now we all have to pay the consequenses)
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To: gusopol3

We use caller ID to scan before answering. We do get fooled when callers are using local landlines. Otherwise, even though we run two businesses, one of them local, we assume a real caller will leave a message. If we are fooled into answering, we hang up as soon as it’s clear who is calling.

As for knowing where we live, I am sure they do. To that end, we are not on social media, although we really had to discuss that option several times before deciding there was more loss of privacy downside than client gain upside.

We do not rate Netflix views. If we want to recommend something, we do it in a private email.

We try to not tag our emails, especially to those w/a gmail account,with any information. We will use a bland subject line and a link, only.

We do review a very few and exceptional Kindle reads. Maybe 4-5 a year, total, and we try to stick to crit of the writing.

On our main computer, I use Do Not Track Me and Better Privacy. I suppress pop-ups except for things like printing shipping labels, where it aborts the process. I see no ads, except on my ISP’s web mail, where I seem to have no choice. It turns out not to be the ISP, but their partner, Yahoo. So, even though I am on an email list that goes through Yahoo, I have cancelled my Yahoo account.

I am rural, so there are no doorknockers. We stopped donating at all to political campaigns after 2012. “Fool me once...” sort of thing. Also, it became very clear that huge money flows to candidates who are already wealthy on their own. They can fund their own campaigns, since they all seem to favor taxing/regulating me excessively once elected. I really hated the out-of-state campaigns that solicited my donations. My representative gets most of his funding from out of state and never has voted in my interest, let alone responded realistically, sans boiler plate, to my concerns.

They may know where you live, but you can starve them of a lot of other information.


14 posted on 11/18/2014 5:07:47 AM PST by reformedliberal
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To: Kaslin
Nate Silver put something out the day after the election showing the average bias in Senate polls was to the Dems by 4 points.

The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats


15 posted on 11/18/2014 5:09:29 AM PST by Wyatt's Torch
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To: kearnyirish2
I'm not sure about that. I think that especially in KY, KS, and GA, many conservatives who had been on the fence about supporting a RINO like McConnell or an establishment type like Roberts finally (wisely) concluded they couldn't return the senate to Reid and actually came out and voted.

If once, just once, the lefty-libertarians would just stay out of a race, it wouldn't be close. We would be near a 60 vote majority in the Senate.

16 posted on 11/18/2014 5:12:23 AM PST by LS ('Castles made of sand, fall in the sea . . . eventually.' Hendrix)
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To: LS

I remember all too well Perot’s candidacy, and the impact on Bush I. It was some comfort to see Al Gore lose Florida with sufficient votes going to Ralph Nader (who deflected criticism for it, blaming Gore’s loss squarely on Gore himself).


17 posted on 11/18/2014 5:15:04 AM PST by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action isa economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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To: Kaslin

I believe it would be great if citizens would just tell all of the pollsters that they are ‘undecided’. ...The pollsters would go nuts and the campaigns wouldn’t know what to do.

I have only a land line phone. I pay the bill for MY convenience of being to call someone; NOT to provide convenience to others wanting to call me.

My family and friends know I will not answer the phone and that I’m often up all night and sleep during most of the day. Therefore, when my phone does ring it goes unanswered and I don’t have to deal with telemarketers, pollsters and political robocalls.


18 posted on 11/18/2014 5:28:07 AM PST by octex
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To: Kaslin

I would never answer a poll... it is not any business.


19 posted on 11/18/2014 6:34:30 AM PST by ExCTCitizen (I'm ExCTCitizen and I approve this reply. If it does offend Libs, I'm NOT sorry...)
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To: LS; fieldmarshaldj

If you take every race that was stolen (VA this year, ND in 2012), or bungled (MO in 2012), or a recruitment failure over the past 3 cycles we’d be closing in on 67.


20 posted on 11/18/2014 7:27:13 AM PST by Impy (They pull a knife, you pull a gun. That's the CHICAGO WAY, and that's how you beat the rats!)
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