More on those pesky polls
Obama’s recent uptick doesn’t seem to be among likely voters.
I’m always puzzled by this “likely voter” thing. Why would people take the trouble to answer a telephone survey about the election, and yet say they are unlikely to vote?
Then again, I’m confused by the entire phenomenon of the non-voter. Even if I were to detest both candidates, I’d vote, even if only to write someone in.
[NOTE: I realized only after I wrote it that the title of this post was an unconscious play on the Boston Red Sox’s Pesky Pole.]
I not only screen calls from 800 numbers (if it’s real they’ll leave a message) but when I pick up and it’s a poll I refuse to answer. This is not because I don’t like to share my opinion, but that most polls have gotten way to long with too many crosstabs. A presidential poll should have these questions.
1. Did you vote in the last election in your state Y/N
2. Party Affilliation
3. M/F
4. Who will you vote for.
If a pollster told me that this would be 30 seconds I’d to it.
Bottom line a 56 year old male suburban engineer is not represented in the poll. But I’m pretty sure that more city residents/lower income/less politically informed respondents are overrepresented.
I think the “likely voter” screen comes from answering a series of questions regarding voting habits in previous elections, rather than any intent to vote in this one…..I “think”
It may also contain some weighting regarding the voting habit of certain age, ethnic, or income groups.
DirtyJobsGuy: well, less busy people must be overrepresented, too.
Tom: no, it doesn’t, at least not in this poll. The voter is asked how likely he/she is to vote: certain, probably, 50/50, or less than that.
The article has a link to the actual questions asked.
Don’t believe the polls, most are heavily rigged.
Drudge is reporting that the ABCNewsWashPost poll that shows O@49% and R@48%
surveyed 33% democrats and 23% republicans…
That’s how heavily they have to weight the poll in favor of the democrats to give Obama a one point lead.
The only thing that has saved the republic is the fact that lots of idiots don’t vote. That’s a very good thing.
I trust neither the polling companies nor the media who sponsor and report the resultant data. There are too many variables; too much agenda driven; and too little integrity.
Then there is the report that less than 10% of those solicited this year.
And finally I’ve read on some conservative blogs that respondents are deliberately lying when polled.
Polls do little to inform.They do go a long way in the direction of agenda driven propaganda.
Mr Frank said:
“The only thing that has saved the republic is the fact that lots of idiots don’t vote. That’s a very good thing.”
Amen, brother…amen, amen!
Obama polling 50% is just slightly less amusing than the days of Saddam Hussein polling 99%.
Whitaker Chambers’s thoughts on the Communist fifth column are apposite, I think. Same mentality.
“What went on in the minds of those Americans . . . that made it possible to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience?
The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence.
Therefore the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as problem of conscience, but a problem of operations. . . .
The failure to understand that fact is part of the total failure of the West to grasp the nature of its enemy, what he wants, what he means to do and how he will go about doing it.
It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate and future are involved, and hence their conflict is irrepressible.”
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/09/remember_the_911_jihad_terror_attacks.html#ixzz26E33uVgl
Another tell. The point from the link:
http://legalinsurrection.com/
(posted 9/12/12 @ 9:07)
Tom is right, in general. Different pollsters use different methods, but that’s the most common approach. (From what I can tell, different methods work better in some elections than others, just to confuse the pollsters even more.)
And, believe it or not, people do sort of tell the truth when they are asked how likely they are to vote, and to do other civic-minded things. Not perfectly, of course, but enough so that a pollster can work with the data.
(One of the less-discussed problems of polling is that many people will answer questions even when they have no opinion. There was a famous example of that in the late ’40s or early ’50s, when a pollster included a question on a fake bill in Congress. Large minorities were willing to say that they were in favor or opposed to this nonexistent bill.)