Posted on 11/08/2002 7:24:47 AM PST by jern
Pollsters' Inaccuracy In 2002 Contests Worries Industry Fri Nov 08 2002 10:16:15 ET
Just before Election Day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a stunning poll about the governor's race in Illinois: GOP candidate Jim Ryan was ahead. The poll was conducted by nationally known pollster John Zogby. Zogby told the Post-Dispatch that he had personally reviewed the result and had affirmed its accuracy. Oops: forty-eight hours later, Mr. Ryan lost big after all. 'We blew it,' Mr. Zogby says now, the WALL STREET JOURNAL reported on Friday.
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And so, it appears, did many other political pollsters. The reasons may be as various as the recent popularity of caller ID and cellphones, which hamper efforts to reach voters, and the nation's increasing ethnic diversity, which makes it harder to get an accurate statistical sampling of the electorate." The Journal adds, "The GOP tilt of the midterm election surprised millions of Americans who had been following pre-election news coverage and commentary. Some survey results did reflect the late Republican surge, which was fueled by President Bush's campaigning.
But those that didn't underscored mounting problems faced by an industry that looms ever larger in U.S. politics as the number and use of polls proliferate. Mr. Zogby goes so far as to say that 'the industry is at a crossroads.'"
The Journal also reports, "Aside from statistical variation, pollsters face a range of problems stemming from the changing mood and makeup of the American electorate. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is declining cooperation from people who simply don't want to be bothered.
Many Americans use caller-ID telephone technology to screen out calls from survey takers. Others hang up in exasperation because they are tired of calls from telemarketers. . The country's continuing stream of immigration also makes accurate polling more difficult, since racial and ethnic groups tend to have distinctive voting patterns.
It used to be that pollsters could be satisfied with representative numbers of whites and blacks in their survey samples.
Now, in states such as California and Texas, pollsters must account for Hispanics and Asians too. And beyond merely measuring the sentiments of various groups, pollsters have the further challenge of divining how to 'weight' their ethnic samples to reflect the expected rate at which demographic groups will actually turn out at the polls on Election Day. . That's not as big a problem in states that are relatively racially homogeneous, such as South Dakota, where polls consistently showed the Senate race between Democrat Tim Johnson and Republican John Thune as close as it turned out to be on Election Day.
(Mr. Johnson beat Mr. Thune by a slender margin of less than one percentage point.) But with the Census Bureau projecting that the U.S. overall will became a nation of minorities by the year 2055, that problem will grow, not recede."
Developing...
Zogby did even worse in 2000, when the Reps lost 5 Senate seats/
I was polled on the phone on 11-4-2002
I lied my ass off!
As far as the pollster is concerned I was for divided government, not invading Iraq, and a Democrat majority in the Senate.
Bwah ha ha ha!
We should have seen it as the pollutant it is then!
The proverbial camel's nose under the tent grew and grew until the camel dwelt inside the tent.
Then Zogby starts editorializing.
Blow off polls vocally, speak against polling in general,
pick Zogby as a scapegoat if necessary, he deserves it.
Mrs. Dawgg claims I have a mean streak concerning telephone interuptions, she cites the following examples:
Once a telemarketing firm called while we had dinner guests.
I put the caller on speaker phone and waited till he asked for a response which was: "is you purdy?"
reponse by TM: click, dial tone.
Next time was a Fundraiser TM during dinner with very same guests in attendance.
The TM was wanting a donation for Native American Orphans.
I declined the offer.
The TM asked "don't you care about starving Native American Orphans?"
My reply: No.
TM response: click, Dial tone.
Yes, which papers like the NY Times buried deep in the paper because they didn't trust the "accuracy" of the survey. IOWs, Republicans were ahead and they just couldn't wrap their feeble minds around that fact. (BTW, watching Brit Hume's show on Monday, he and his panel also dismissed the survey numbers as probably inaccurate.)
This can all be boiled down to the pre-set minds of the media and the pollsters. The numbers were there, the pollsters and the media just didn't agree with them.
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