Posted on 10/31/2008 7:22:56 AM PDT by Alvin Poon
I have been reading with interest on this forum and others how the poll numbers we are seeing are inaccurate. Every poll showing Obama with a lead is readily scoffed at because of some sort of bias or an other.
So i did a simple "google" of the last 2 presidential campaigns to see how accurate the polls really were. I am very sad to say I was not happy with the results of my search. It appears that almost all of the national polls were VERY accurate in their prediction of the outcome. The inaccuracy came from the EXIT polling which is much less scientific.
I am looking for a ray of hope here for McCain, but those claiming the polls are "off" or "you can't trust the polls" do not look to the most recent historical fact: The polls taken right before the last 2 presidential elections have been extremely accurate.
Please tell me why this time it's different.
“I am just feeling very sad for our country right now and wanting someone to show me there is some hope out of this madness.”
So spouting off with statements that are untrue makes you happy? Stop wasting our time.
Please, the polls showed Kerry ahead on election day not trailing. I don’t like calling people trolls but in your case I’ll make an exception. Go back to DUmmie land with your BS.
Funny you should cite the NCPP...
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Des Moines Register Iowa Poll
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The Gallup Poll
Harris Interactive, Inc.
The Hotline
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Los Angeles Times
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SurveyUSA
The polls from previous elections did not overweight Democrats as ridiculously as they are doing this year. Every election cycle they screech about how Dem turnout will be enormous. Every election cycle it doesn’t pan out. This year the pollsters have lost their ever-lovin’ minds oversampling Dems to Republicans. The last two presidential elections Bush was picked to lose. He won. Dole was picked to lose by 23 points. He only lost by 8! DO THE MATH. This year McCain is picked to lose. He has as good of a chance to win as Obama. They are in a statistical tie in the polls today, and NONE of the polls are figuring for Bradley. Every election cycle the Dems are shown WELL ahead of Republicans in the polls, only to “tighten” at the end. If you have really been following these poll threads for the last couple of months you have heard Freepers saying that these polls are bogus and not to pay attention until the week before the election because they are nothing but Democrat propoganda. The Freepers were right. Now the Freepers are telling you the weightings are ridiculously skewed and McCain is going to win this election by a hair. That’s your info. And you need to check your previous year facts.
Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted.
‘choose not to participate’...as a voter for Palin/McCain on election day I would not know if I have received a call from a polling outfit...do not pick up calls if caller i.d. does not ring a bell.
Sounds like a Troll-in-waiting to me.
*****At any rate, polls based on likely or registered voters should be suspect. They very likely have a sampling that has too many Democrats in it. The poll results are therefore going to inevitably lean toward Obama. This could mean a nasty surprise for pollsters in November, but only if the polls themselves don’t discourage conservatives from voting because it looks hopeless for McCain and Palin.
This year of all years, DON’T BELIEVE THE POLLS. I’m betting they’re skewed because Operation Chaos gave us a false distribution of Democrats and Republicans among registered voters.*******
http://www.politicalbase.com/profile/twayneking/blog/&blogId=4881
http://www.ncpp.org/drupal57/files/2004%20Election%20Analysis.pdf
The mean error was 0.9% at the national level, and 1.7% for all state races combined - FL actually polled quite accurately. The 2000 numbers are similar.
McCain needs a large "Bradly Effect", or a disproportionate Republican turnout, or most of the polls have to be substantially oversampling Democrat voters or there has to be a large final-days swing occurring (and likely, he needs some combination of all of these) to turn this election around at the electoral college level.
Does not mean it can't happen, but if these factors are in play they are not reflected in current polling, which shows about the average tightening of a presidential race over the last two weeks.
Hey! I have a 2008 registration date but I know this idea is full of ****!
This election is VASTLY different from previous ones. Bradley effect, MSM bias, heck even Fox News seems to be in the tank for 0bama half the time, poor polling - even the pollsters are ADMITTING they’re fudging the numbers because they have no idea what to do about young people, cell phones, and people just plain lying to distort their results.
A thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters, er polls, will eventually produce one correct prediction. I don’t think any of these poll monkeys have gotten it right just yet for this election.
The polls taken right before
That’s the key. They are wildly, tenaciously, inaccurate until the last minute - because then they can be compared against the real vote. Until then only fools pay attention to them.
You miss the point. The polls probably were right but you looked at their results as of election day. What most freepers are complaining about is the fact that the polls always seem to show the dem winning by HUGE margins. . .right up until the point the dem loses. Why is that? Could it be an attempt to demoralize our base, perhaps.
So...I heard this morning that the there are enough Dems in CA alone to scew the polls by the +3% that Obama has nationally....Now HOW IS THAT FOR A RAY OF HOPE!
Sadley...that means that the way we do the electorial college (with CA having 55) sucks.
good try...but it’s not working here
That's a very interesting speculation, and one I've not heard before - the test would be to look at 2008 registration in predominately white ZIP codes in districts where there was not a strongly contested Republican primary, and see if you could find evidence of increased "cross-over" registrations after CHAOS was in full swing.
Another interesting aspect of this will be if a consensus forms as to whether CHAOS was a good idea; one effect of a longer contested Democrat primary season is that both Obama and Clinton were forced to to continue to build their organizations well after the point in the election cycle when the likely nominee is often clear. In particular, this may have been a big factor in Obama's very strong ground game even prior to the convention... this sort of GOTV and fundraising effort used to be a built-in Republican advantage in national elections.
If you actually spent some time here and read many of the articles you would know why the polls are bogus and would not be “feeling very sad for our country right now.”
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