Can you guys tell me why the pollsters would rig their polls to benefit Obama? Is it because they prefer him or are they just off on the expected turnout?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Chad,
In my opinion, the polls are flawed for a few reasons:
1. Many of them over-inflate Dem. numbers (I saw one poll that had 60% dem. 40% rep - thats not happening)
2. Many people who actually respond are likely to say they support Obama even though they don’t - and I wouldn’t even call it the “Bradley Effect”. It’s more like the “I don’t want to hear it, so I’ll say Obama effect”
3. I heard that about 80% of initial polling calls are not answered or refused. I know that I have caller ID and rarely, if ever, answer random numbers.
4. If you look at the undecided numbers, some of them are significant (about 6-10%). In my eyes, an undecided voter at this point is either not going to vote or is a closet McCain voter for some of the reasons mentioned above.
Again, just my opinion...
voter apathy...convince the populus that it is in the bag for obama and to just stay home...if we turn out in force, the dems do not have a chance
LET ME TELL YOU HOW POLLS WORK.
Pollsters need to know two things. They want to know what percentage of Registered Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will be voting. And then they want to know who those that are voting will be voting for.
What they do is use the voting history of registered Voters coupled with what they call their enthusiasm rating to determine what percentage of each group will vote.
Once they know the percentage of each group that will vote they just use that rate times the number of voters registered in that group and that gives them the total number of voters in that group.
If for example there are 4.0 million Democrats Registered in Ohio and of those Democrats surveyed it was determined that 70 percent were actually going to vote then the total Democrat vote would be 2.8 million Democrats. If there were 3.5 million Republicans registered and their turn out rate was determined to be 70 percent then the total number of Republicans voting would be 2.45 million Democrats.
if there were 3 million independents and their turn out was 70 percent then we would have 2.1 million independents voting
Thus 2.1 plus 2.45 plus 2.8 equals 7.35 million voters. And 2.8 million Democrats are 38 percent of the voters. And how the Democrats told the pollsters they are voting becomes 38 percent of total vote.
But what if ACORN has registered 400 thousand fake names and none of those 400 thousands fakes are going to actually vote. Then the polls for that state will show Obama with more than 300 thousand votes he will not get.
The polls are wrong because ACORN registered fake voters. They registered 250 thousand of them in Ohio in 2004. None of them voted. Bush had thousands of lawyers to stop them if they tried. But believe it or not, none tried. But it did screw with the polls in 2004.
Kerry refused to concede Ohio in 2004 because he KNEW he should have gotten 250,000 more votes than he did. You may remember his campaign talking to the media about the missing 250 thousand votes in Ohio on election night.
The morning after the election Kerry called all 88 Ohio county boards of elections. They told him his 250 thousand new Democrat voters that had been registered in 2004, had in fact, not voted. It was then that he at long last conceded to Bush.
To throw the polls off all one has to do is pay ACORN to register lots of fake names as Democrat voters.
The idea is to make Obama look like a sure winner. And they believe that independent voters want to vote for the winner. And if that is the case an Obama 12 point lead in the final polls will turn out to be a 3 or 4 point lead in the final vote.
But if they had not screwed with the registered voter numbers then Obama might lose by 1 or 3 points.
There is a problem with the enthusiasm questions being used to determine who will vote. Never in our past have more than a handful of voters voted against a candidate. Always the vast majority of voters have voted for their candidate. This may be the first election in our history where a large number of voters voted against a candidate.
There are lots of voters who are not voting FOR MCCAIN.. THEY are voting McCain to keep OBAMA from being our next president.
Missing that factor may also result in the history and enthusiasm factors the pollsters use to determine turn out being very wrong. The turn out for McCain may be a lot higher than polls predict.
We will soon know. The large variation in polls is likley due to how many of the ACORN registered voters the pollsters are counting.
In my area of Indiana over 20% of the Spring democratic precinct vote were cast by republicans, but according to some they're just republican who have changed their affiliation because of Bush hatred.
Well DUH!
Don't remember how many other states would be involved.