FAQ - The Polls!!

1) Okay, you’re about to tell us why we shouldn’t believe the polls but not three hours ago you drew our attention to a poll that showed Lieberman winning. What you’re really saying is that we should only believe the polls that you like, right? You’re a big ugly hypocrite, just like Glenn Greenwald says.

2) Cheap shot. Why don’t you engage in a fair debate with him on the issues rather than just insult him?

Frankly, I would rather...than engage in any kind of debate with Glenn Greenwald. Sorry – a blog feud with Greenwald just isn’t in the cards. Now can we get back on topic?

3) Fine. What’s up with the polls? One congressional race had a poll where one guy was winning by 13. Another taken at the same time had the other candidate winning by 13. What gives?

No. Both polls provide information. Information is just material that we can analyze. For instance, if I told you a baseball player was a good player because he had a .280 batting average, you wouldn’t just buy my conclusion; you’d have other questions. You’d want to know how many homeruns he hit and how many walks he had and what kind of fielder he was and more. But you also wouldn’t want to dismiss the information that he hits .280 as irrelevant.

The pollsters’ conclusions are based on raw information and certain assumptions and analyses that they add to that information. It’s true that without understanding their assumptions and analyses, you can’t assess for yourself whether their results are accurate. Actually, a better word than “results” would be “predictions.”

It’s not like pollsters just calculate the raw results of their phone calls and then present them. Among other things, they take those results and adjust them to make sure the pool of respondents has the correct number of old people, young people, Jewish people, Republican people, Democratic people, etcetera.

7) How do they know what the correct proportions will be for all these groups? These pollsters must be some kind of genius species!

They most assuredly are not. The short answer to your question is they don’t know what the correct proportions are. Each pollster has his own secret sauce based on past voting patterns and his own sense of the current lay of the land. The main reason we’re seeing such diverging poll results is because different pollsters have radically different senses of what the current lay of the land is. For instance, the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s pollster apparently feels that 97% of Minnesota’s voters will be Democrats which is why the Strib’s current Senate poll shows Mark Kennedy pulling only 2% of the vote.

I’d say no. They tell you what their conclusions are, but they don’t tell you their raw numbers or specifically what methodology they used to arrived at their conclusions regarding proper weighting. So whatever tortured logic the Star Tribune is using is not made clear to the people silly enough to use that newspaper for any purpose other than pet training.

Their difficulty in getting raw numbers has increased. A lot of people don’t have land telephones any more. Also, responding to a poll takes forever. If you ever read the internals of these things, you see they typically have around 60 questions. It would take a very patient person to sit still for an entire session. Maybe in the 1970’s people were more inclined to sit still for such nonsense because they had nothing else to do. But now 200 channels on the dish and naked people on the internet are only a few tantalizing feet away.

11) So respondents are generally speaking people without lives or interests, even prurient ones?

Not really. At the risk of being overly snarky, one of the reasons that liberals are being over-sampled is because as a group they’re more likely to be big-mouths; they’re more passionate about sharing their opinions and viewpoints with strangers. As a rule of thumb, conservatives aren’t as prone to such behavior.

12) Strange sentiment for a conservative blogger to have. Anyway, it sounds like a crass stereotype to me. Can you back it up?

With statistics, no. But I can give you an irrefutable piece of anecdotal evidence. Ask yourself how many cars you’ve seen today with a bumper sticker that said “Kerry” or has a W with a slash through it or boasts some other hackneyed liberal sentiment. And then ask yourself how many cars you’ve seen whose owners have decided to festoon their automobiles with conservative sentiments of a similar sort. I’d wager that even if you live in the reddest part Texas, you’ve seen a lot more liberal cars today than conservative ones.

Actually, I’m beginning to get the sense that November 7 may not be a disaster at all. The Republican base will never make as much noise as the nutroots. Add to that the fact that the Democrats’ noise gets further amplified through the mainstream media’s megaphone and you have a real difference in volume. But I’m beginning to think the noise doesn’t reflect electoral reality. It didn’t in 2002, it didn’t in 2004, and it didn’t even on Election Day in 2004 when the exit polling of actual voters (as opposed to typical polling which desperately tries to figure who likely voters are) was horrendously inaccurate.

Another thing: I’m just not seeing the left moving. Ned Lamont may well turn out to be liberalism’s croaking canary in the coal mine.

It is very difficult to take a fully accurate poll. It requires thorough professionalism, a track record of success to validate the methodology, and an unwavering dedication to objectivity and fairness.

That is why here in CT one poll has Lieberman leading Lamont by seventeen points while another has the margin at seven points.

That is not mere margin of error--at least one of those polls is a complete joke and that polling company should close their doors and get a real day job.

To the pollsters I say this--"There are no excuses. Get it right the first time, every time, or shut up now and forever."

Democrats Offer to Let GOP Keep Some Seats
by Scott Ott

(2006-10-19) — With Republican electoral prospects dimming by the hour, Congressional Democrats today offered to forego “the embarrassment of counting the votes” from the upcoming national elections, but to let the GOP keep some of its seats in the House and Senate.

“It’s kind of like an out-of-court settlement,” said presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA. “We’ll let our friends across the aisle avoid the humiliation of a public thrashing by our strong, attractive Democrat candidates, but we’ll demonstrate mercy by conceding a few seats, so that Republicans have at least a token voice in national affairs.”

An unnamed spokesman for the Republican National Committee (RNC) called the Democrat offer “gracious”, and said the two parties were negotiating over when and where Interim House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL, will give the concession speech.

Republicans have staggered in recent weeks under a barrage of painful publicity ranging from plunging fuel prices, to record stock market closes, to the Bush administration’s failure to produce inflation despite growing employment, reduced tax rates and soaring tax revenues.

Meanwhile, Democrats ride a wave of public adoration due to the party’s clear, positive vision for protecting the civil rights of foreign terrorists, retreating from Iraq so that rival Muslim sects can work out their differences without American interference, and restoring the Clinton era “spirit of cooperation” with North Korea.

While some critics have suggested that both parties wait until the American people speak at the ballot box before declaring winners and losers, Rep. Pelosi called that kind of thinking “a quaint relic of ancient history, made obsolete by political pollsters and media pundits.”

“After all,” she said, “just because we’re the Democrat party doesn’t mean we have to be slavishly democratic. Some things are better decided by a few smart people behind closed doors.”

Catch 22 is that the Dems are still on the lookout for “a few smart people”. Their “plan” is still secret. It took everything out of them to come up with a slogan. “‘For the common good’ will get those Dem numbers up. I’m Karl Marx, and I approve of this massage…er, message.”

Comment by onlineanalyst — October 19, 2006 @ 6:58 am

Regarding the story: that is downright gracious of Dem*…I can just imagine which RINO’s, er, Republicans they’d keep, too.

*Pun intended.

Comment by camojack — October 19, 2006 @ 7:01 am

Are the Dems singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” while they play musical chairs? Time will tell.

Comment by onlineanalyst — October 19, 2006 @ 7:20 am

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