Posted on 10/09/2012 5:25:23 AM PDT by drellberg
Mark it down on your calendars: Yesterday — Monday, Oct. 8, 2012 — may go down in the annals of history as the day political polling died.
It was the most ridiculous polling day among many preposterous polling days in the course of this long campaign.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
May as well be the anals of history, since they seem to be pulling these numbers out of their @$$es.
No surprise here at all.
The Sunday "Talk Shows" are merely Obama commercials and chest-pounding Liberal hacks who spout the Talking Points that the DNC/White Hut has handed them on Friday, and the State-Run-Media does its job of promoting The Messiah, and beating up on ALL Republicans/Conservatives, with the provided phony data.
Couch potatoes and Leftist Loons who watch this bullshit are cheering and high-fiving, while REAL Americans who PAY TAXES see that it's a real uphill battle to out-vote the parasites and Union-inspired leeches.
Polling has been dead for years. Now they are finally laying it to rest. RIP.
The polls aren’t going away ... the media covers the polls, not the issues (Libya, economy, F&F, etc). It’s a lot less work than digging up stories, doing research, interviewing key people, etc. and they can easily skew/interpret poll results to fit their narrative, especially if they don’t like the reality on the ground.
Give Romney 5-10 pts. in any poll for the Bradley Effect which also has a gay component this election.
First, I was zotted in the spring. My posting privileges have recently been restored. I love free republic and I am grateful to be back.
Next ... This is a great article, as far as it goes. On their own merits, these polls are all garbage.
But what strikes me as I read this article and articles like it is that they all miss the larger point. If the point is to assess the likelihood that one candidate or the other will win, or even if they are on the right campaign path, then the technology is as dated as the land (phone) lines on which it is predicated.
There have always been models that forecast election outcomes based on unemployment rates, GDP growth, inflation, etc, and they do well, and they are more credible than the polling numbers in, say May, when both candidates have been chosen but few undecided voters are seriously mulling their decisions.
But this time around I sense — largely from reading free republic — that there is so much, much, much more data available. There are voter registration data, campaign contribution data, the sizes of crowds that show up to see a candidate, absentee voter data, and so much more.
Going forward there will be even more, and we will have this election as a benchmark to use in 2016.
We haven’t had the election yet, so the full story of how these polls fare has yet to unfold. But I have gone from being bewildered by the disparity between these polls and what I know from other, better sources of information to simply not following the polls at all. For me at this point they are simply a bunch of numbers on a page that mean absolutely nothing. I try to feign interest, because I have been obsessed with them for years. But I can’t even muster the time to click onto real clear politics. The numbers now serve only to distract.
I agree with you. This past Sunday was a bad day for the polls. Yes, there are problems with the polls. The only thing I would conclude from the polls is that the election is close. Beyond that, the conventional plus or minus factor (which is tiny when you average all the credible polls) is swamped by uncertainties regarding bias.
“May as well be the anals of history, since they seem to be pulling these numbers out of their @$$es.”
Post of the day: Graphihc yet unforgettable. Congratulations on your win.
We no longer need polls. It is strictly for entertainment value and talking points.
Exit polls should be banned. Any reporting on an election before the polls close should be banned. Projected winners should be banned.
You vote, you get your thumb dyed pruple.
End of story.
Welcome back and may I say a well written post. The daily polls will drive you nuts if you follow them closely as they are not focused polls and they don’t resemble the internal polling of the canidates.
I also feel that they are designed, by weighting the sample, to produce a horse race where perhaps there is none.
We no longer need polls. It is strictly for entertainment value and talking points.
Exit polls should be banned. Any reporting on an election before the polls close should be banned. Projected winners should be banned.
You vote, you get your thumb dyed purple.
End of story.
Thank you buffaloguy.
I don’t post very often, but I am very happy to be back.
” The only thing I would conclude from the polls is that the election is close. “
Then the lame-streams have done their job.
Every lame-stream poll over-samples Dims. Every one of them. The only difference is by how much.
I always click straight to the internals to see the party make-up. Do you?
And people who only get their information from tv are presented crap poll after crap poll saying Zero is leading (or now that it is tied up) and NO MENTION of the party breakdown is given.
The Lames are now hard at work trying to convince people who saw the debate not to believe their lying eyes and ears.
No crap! Didn't the exit polls predicted Chavez opponent the winner? So much for exit polling!! It's all an ACT like Obumbler told all those HELLywood stars at the fund raiser! He think the presidency is an Acting job and the WH is the stage...GOSH I DESPISE THAT MAN!!
It's a matter of being an informed consumer of information.
In Venezuela, it IS against the law to conduct an exit poll. A Spanish company conducted one, nevertheless. As a result, we can suspect that Chavez stole the election.
I’m not saying exit polls are right or even unbiased. They tend to be skewed Democrat. The so-called raw exit polls have to be messaged to be interpreted. But, they give us information such as when voters decided. And, it’s information independent of the government and protected by the First Amendment.
This year, for the media polls, I’ve been using a turnout model about halfway between 2004 and 2008. I figure blacks will turn out in numbers similar to 2008, but younger voters will turn out in numbers similar to 2004.
I don’t track Gallup or Rasmussen.
Gallup, the premier polling organization of all time, has marginalized itself by not using a likely voter filter. Its poll is now not informative.
Rasmussen has a dynamic turn out model, which I respect, and simply use without further adjustment.
I also average over the past thirty days (except panel-based surveys, which I only use the most recent), and aggregate all the state polls into another huge national poll. (I use a weighted average of the state polls.)
Last time around, by election day, I amassed an aggregate poll of 250,000. It proved to be spot on, but I still thought McCain had a chance to win because of the Bradley effect. But, there was no Bradley effect.
My call for this election, based on where the polls are right now, allowing 2/3rds of the ever dwindling number of undecideds to shift to Romney, and 1/2 of Johnson’s support to shift to Romney:
Romney wins all the heavily contested battleground states + NM + PA. MI would be next.
But, there’s momentum out there. In 2004, Bush came back from a loss to Kerry in the first Presidential debate to do well in the 2nd and 3rd. This year, Romney scored an even bigger win in the first Presidential debate. We will see just what kind of a man Obama is, in the next two Presidential debates. If he doesn’t reach down inside himself, and respond to the challenge, Romney could go on to a landslide victory.
How does that description of the race as it now stands compare to what you think?
I think the debate makes a big difference, which is unusual. Obama’s support hasn’t changed for months, and is unlikely to change. It’s around 47% or so. What Obama has to do to win is to convince the undecideds that Romney is an unacceptable alternative. Before the debate, there’s some evidence that was working fairly well. That changed after the debate, and I don’t think future debates will change this.
Say Obama does better in the next two debates, so what? People aren’t all of a sudden going to support him because of a good debate. The question is about Romney, the unknown. If Romney does as well in the next debates as he did in the first one, it won’t matter how Obama does, because aren’t asking questions about Obama, but about Romney.
I think the state of the race is Romney is winning a close race. The recent polling is still largely skewed unrealistically Dem, and even with this, Romney has a lead. He’s doing at least as well in recent polls among undecideds as Obama did in ‘08. Hard to see how Obama can win if undecideds break decisively for Romney. I can’t believe the Dems can make that up with better turnout than the GOP.
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