Polling Propaganda

 When the Media Massages the Message

The state of polling operating in the US election is dismal indeed.  Why?  Because media need to generate headlines to sell papers or get viewers.  In election season poll results are essential to do that.  So sub-standard, crummy polls are the order of the day--where "pollsters" call up Aunt Fanny and talk to her Chihuahua, and then record the Chihuahua as a certain Democratic voter.

 Jay Severin, a political campaign operator for over twenty-five years, explains why this is the case:

There are maybe five pollsters in America who could not successfully be sued for malpractice. There is nothing so common and useless in American media/”politics” than inept polls. Worse, it is easy and cheap to produce a “poll,” which hustlers and newspapers (forgive the redundancy), know is obviously inaccurate. Good polls, by good pollsters, are very difficult to produce ad very expensive.

The New York Times doesn’t want an accurate poll; they want the cheapest poll they can report by day-after-tomorrow. They do this by ignoring virtually all the tenets of a good poll in favor of quick/cheap/bad polls – which have an added advantage for the MSM: they are polls guaranteed to yield liberal results.

Why are these polls inaccurate? Of 100 Americans eligible to vote, only circa 1/3 of us turn out. So when you talk to non-voters (2/3 of the sample), you get non-results. But bad pollsters don’t care about that minor detail! They want a headline.  Most of the bad polls we see today are based on voter turn out models of 2008. Why? There has been a national election since then: 2010. Difference is Obama voters turned out/won 2008 – Tea Party/Patriots turned out in 2010.

Bottom line, the majority of polls we see are garbage. Average results of 10 bad polls, know what that yields? One bad average.  The real polling in this – and every campaign – is being done in strictest confidence by top pollsters, at a cost of $1Million+ Per Month! Know what NBC Pays per month for its polling? Same as your electric bill. Think that affects quality of results? . . .

If you want good polls check out Doug Schoen, Scott Rasmussen, or Pat Caddell.

We expect that talking heads and media pundits will be gravely informing us right up until the election that it is "too close to call".

Media have a vested interest in ginning up the race, telling us how close it is to sell more of its product.  If the market thinks its a done deal, advertising revenue will end up going down as readers and viewers wander off to something else. That is the most benign explanation for covering over the actual polling results.  A more sinister explanation would finger ideological bias toward Democrats.

Here is an example of the current persistent distortion of results--this time from The Washington Post and ABC.

This morning, Washington Post & ABC released their latest poll of the presidential race. Naturally, they find Obama leading Romney by 3 points, 49-46. This is similar to their last poll, which found Obama leading by 2, 49-47.

Similar, but very, very different. Their last poll had a D+3 sample. (An assumption that Democratic voters are going to turn out to vote at a 3 percent higher rate than historically has been the case.  The poll is weighted in the Democrat's favour.) Today, though, to keep Obama where he was, they had to juice the sample to D+9. So, WaPo's poll is based on an unrealistic best-case scenario for Democrat turnout, and Obama is still under 50%.

Doom.  In 2008, Democrats enjoyed their biggest turnout advantage in decades. The electorate was D+7. That year, Obama won the election by 7 points. Today's WaPo poll, against all available evidence, envisions an electorate that is even more Democrat, tipping the scales to give the Dems a +9 advantage. Even then, Obama's lead is only 3 points, and he is still stuck at the nettlesome 49%.

Keep in mind, the previous poll from WaPo was conducted before the first presidential debate. That was widely seen as a complete disaster for Obama. Even in today's poll, WaPo finds that, by a 51-point margin, voters thought Romney won the debate. Yet, today's poll assumes that Democrats will have a 3x greater turnout edge than the previous poll. WaPo and ABC would have you believe that there has been the greatest surge to the Democrat party ever recorded.

A Romney landslide?  Could be.  We recall the talking heads gravely saying that the Carter/Reagan election was "too close to call" right up to the day--and we all know how that turned out.