Bush Senior Strategist Matthew Dowd talks about the polls.

Hugh Hewitt's website ^ | 10/12/04 | Hugh Hewitt

[jwalsh07]

Read the WaPost tonight or tomorrow. Something going on there. A couple of articles that are definitely helpful to Bush. Weird.

[Torie]

Without reading the articles whatever they are, I have been alone on this board in saying the Washington Post is a splendid newspaper, and to lump it in with some of the liberal rags is a silly conflation.

[jwalsh07]

Are you accusing me of lumping silly conflations? :-}

[wynter]

Just jumping in here to ask a question... Where are these 100,000 new voters in Fl. and somewhere else.. can't remember.. coming from. I mean, are they Democrats or Republicans? What stirred them up? I'm getting worried that there are a lot of voters signed up that we have no idea why they're voting. Did someone just round them all up and bus them in? Show them a number and tell them to punch it? That did happen once a few years ago. But they just kept on punching other numbers. Maybe these are the same type of voters. It's really really bothering me. They said they have more people registering now that they've ever had.

[KnutCase]

Perhaps the Dems are "seminar pollees", lying to the Polsters just as "seminar callers" try to worm their way into Rush and Hannity talk shows. We've all heard them...."I've been a long term Republican/Conservative, but my mind has been changed since Bush has been in office, blah, blah, blah....". It may be a massive ploy to skew the polls by the DNC. Perhaps just another technique developed since Florida 2000.

[Torie]

I suspect that accusation might have traction, but I can't prove it, so I assume a position of modest patience on that one. :) All I know, is that only Torie that I know of has said good things about the Washington Post, and that I think the rag is fair and balanced these days. It probably is because Woodward is running things, and he is a Rockefeller type Pubbie. I know the type, and the species is not wholly foreign to me.

[COEXERJ145]

Very likely. Look at what they've been doing to all the online polls after each debate. The DNC and Kerry campaign send out an e-mail to all their cronies giving them links to all the polls they need to hit. They also use BOTS, programs that auto vote until told to stop, to flood the polls with pro-Kerry results.

[midftfan]

Following the second debate the first MSNBC flashpoll had Kerry winning 77% to 23% when most objective observers thought it was a Bush win or draw. I may be wrong on the exact numbers, but I do remember that Kerry had a huge margin. Don't think people aren't influenced by the numbers game, and the Dems know it. I have no doubt they are rigging the polls with a huge misinformation campaign to convince the duped out there of Kerry's comeback. We all know now what levels the Dems will go to win this election, so it shouldn't surprise any of us.

[gop_gene]

I think the poll you're referring to was the USA Today/Gallup poll which had some curious data. It had 24% of the conservatives voting for Kerry, and that Bush only had a 5 point lead overall in the southern states.

Already that's suspect--there's NO way Bush is anywhere near up only a 5 point average in the South (would be just like saying Kerry is up on average 5 points in the NE and Western Seaboard). As for the conservatives, that # is hogwash--W's base is rock solid, he has well over 90% of it intact.

[OpusatFR]

"Pinheads like articulate lawyer types who seem to absorb and thrive on detail."

Don't give lawyers that much credit. The field is overburdened with some whomping morons and mediocre thinkers, and lots wind up in Congress!

The reason we have problems in this country is that lawyers thrive on sophistry while those in business, engineering, and the solid sciences rely on sets of facts and theories that actually arrive at an outcome which may have variables, but if the premise is not correct, the product or result will fail.

GWB is trained as an businessman. He has an MBA from Harvard. He isn't trained in sophistry or equivocation. I have little respect for lawyers at this juncture.

[reformedliberal]

I think it is an old technique.

My late father was a die-hard FDR Democrat. Back in the 1980s, I asked him if he had been polled. We talked about this for a bit (he had been) and he grinned and said:"I lie to them". If you knew my Dad, this was a total shock. The man would choke before he lied. He would evade rather than lie. Personally, in over 50 years, I never caught him in a lie nor even suspected he was lying, ever. But, he considered it a personal responsibility to not tell pollsters a thing that they could ever use w/any reliability.