Posted on 11/04/2004 11:30:46 AM PST by Nascardude
Those faulty exit polls were sabotage
By now it is well-known and a part of the 2004 election lore how the exit polls by the major television networks were wrong.
Likely this faux pas will assume its place among wartime stories alongside the mistaken calls on Florida’s vote for one side and then for the other in the 2000 election. But the inaccuracies of the media’s polling deserve more scrutiny and investigation.
Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.
So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. When I worked on Vicente Fox’s campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the actual counting impossible.
But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong. So, according to ABC-TV’s exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.
To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.
The mistaken exit polls infiltrated all three networks and the cable news outlets and had a chilling effect on the coverage of election night.
While all anchors refrained from announcing the exit-poll results, it was clear from the context of their comments that they expected Kerry to win and wondered if Bush could hold any key state.
Indeed, one network hesitated to call Mississippi for Bush because of the uncertainty injected by the bogus exit polls. Dark minds will suspect that these polls were deliberately manipulated to dampen Bush turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones by conveying the impression that the president’s candidacy was a lost cause.
The exit pollsters plead that they oversampled women and that this led to their mistakes. But the very first thing a pollster does is weight or quota for gender. Once the female vote reaches 52 percent of the sample, one either refuses additional female respondents or weights down the ones one subsequently counted.
This is, dear Watson, elementary.
Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.
At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.
This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.
He's right. How can you get exit polls wrong? You can't.
nick
Yeah. These exit pollsters have a thriving business and they will hate seeing it go down the drain!
It is great to see all these MSM stations get all defensive and point to the next man. "we didn't show it! They did. It was theeeeeeem". Now if Kerry won, they would be like "We told you early on he would". Let us hope some investigation can come of this. I just want to watch them squirm, haha.
Dick Morris rules. I've read 3 of his books and look forward to reading the Clinton memoir debunking. One of his great revelations was perhaps his least profound and investigatory: In Hillary's autobiography she says that she's named after Sir Edmond Hillary, the first man to climb Mt. Everest.... Dick Morris did a 30 second check on this fact and found out that Mr. Hillary did this about 4 years after Hildabeast Clinton was born.
I wish Bernie Goldberg and Pat Cadell would join him. Those 3 liberals together would make more noise than could be ignored.
Can you tell me if Clooney's dad, Mr. Clooney won in his home state?
Already posted (with proper title):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1269756/posts
Go get em' Dick
While we have a short while to celebrate this GREAT victory, we can't pause too long.
The MSM will not be neutralized without a fight. They still have mic's and paper and 30 million viewers and readers and will try to exercise their muscle in 2 years. We've got to keep the pressure on.
Good luck Dick. Just how is he going to expose this scandal?
Republicans can't even make headway with the forged document scandal.
No - he was defeated.
He lost
Clooney's dad lost.
Just imagine if some honest journalists had nipped the Big Three anchors in the bud.
Keep it up, Dick!
That is because it affects Dick Morris' business.
This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.
As much as I really don't like the Toe Sucker, the Toe Sucker is an expert in such matters and he is right on the money with respect to this issue. Some one needs to be held accountable and this issue needs to be put on the front pages of the major newspapers (sadly, of course that won't happen)
I think he is right, but I wish someone with more credibilty would take up this issue. This was definitely sabotage.
Do we know who leaked them to Drudge & co.?
Let's not forget Zogby's 5 pm election day final poll...shameless attempt to affect Republican turnout especially in mid and western states.
Dick Morris rools!!! He called for the Bushman
in late Sept and then reiterated a few days before
the election.
BTW, whatever happened to Larry Sabato and his
crystal ball? Is it still out at the cleaners?
Zogby + Sabato = HACK
MV
sic'em Dick.
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