POLITICS: Kill the Pollsters
Fund, John H.
"POLITICS: Kill the Pollsters"JOHN H. FUND TO AGREE WITH SHAKESPEARE that first we kill all the lawyers. I was hasty. We should probably start with the pollsters. Even if they do good work,...
...People like to tell pollsters they plan to fulfill their civic duty and vote...
...In addition, the Thursday night survey, due to the lateness of the hour, was limited to the Mountain and Pacific Time Zones...
...NOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41 Take the Liberal Test, Purchase Apparel and Merchandise, Tell Your Friends...
...Democracy Corps, a very partisan Democratic firm, found a two-point bounce for Mr...
...and thus conducted interviews only on Thursday night (debate night), Friday night (when many pollsters believe Democrats are more likely to be at home), and Saturday morning, a highly unusual time to call people...
...The poll they most cited was Newsweek's, which showed Kerry with a two-point lead, lending credence to the magazine's glowing cover story about the Democrat ("Off the Ropes...
...Its September 11 poll showing a strong Bush lead was based on a partisan breakdown of 39 percent Republicans, 30 percent Democrats, and 27 percent Independents...
...ABC's poll found no change...
...The early October polls showed Kerry tied with Bush among registered voters, but Bush leading among likely voters...
...Just after the Republican convention, Newsweek found President Bush ahead by 11 points, far more than other polls...
...One explanation is Newsweek's different mix of partisans in its survey sample...
...In 1996, Newsweek's late- October survey had Bob Dole losing to Bill Clinton by a whopping 23 points...
...After John Kerry's successful performance in the first debate, Democrats were crowing about a dramatic shift toward him...
...That would leave an "unadjusted" Newsweek poll with a two-point swing, roughly the same as almost all other pollsters...
...There were other anomalies...
...Newsweek, on the other hand, showed a 13-point swing from its pre-debate poll to its post-debate poll...
...But the Newsweek poll merited a small pillar of salt...
...Even with those efforts, polls often oversample groups such as blue-collar women that end up not voting in high numbers...
...Reporters should tell us which polls have a good track record, which have been clunkers, how much pollsters "push" the undecided to a candidate, and how much less reliable some individual state surveys are...
...Dole lost by eight...
...Newsweek released its post-debate poll on Saturday at 6 p.m...
...If you buy Newsweek's methodology, one out of nine voters had changed party affiliation in a single month, and one of eight voters had changed their mind on how they would vote...
...The polls have bounced up and down this election season, almost all of them showing George W. Bush and John Kerry within the three- or four-point margin of error in all the polls...
...Kerry after the debate and Mr...
...But before they drive a candidate's supporters to despair or allow the media to beat a stereotype to death, some basic consumer reporting would help...
...Excluding so many states for one night can certainly throw off a sample taken over only two nights and a Saturday...
...Warren Mitofsky, who developed exit polling for CBS News in the 1960s, believes Democrats are more likely to respond to media polls than are Republicans, who may distrust the "liberal" news media...
...r THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME Newsweek has been way out of whack with the findings of other pollsters...
...That's a sample clearly too rich in Republicans...
...Newsweek isn't alone in getting things wrong...
...The polls are a prime cause of this bandwagon effect...
...Pollsters tell me they now have to make 14 calls in order to get one "completed" interview as Americans routinely hide behind answering machines or otherwise refuse to answer...
...Then until the polls turn again, coverage conforms to the stereotype...
...READ WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT GY111 (.1 ._,M"au-L1 -The most fun I've had with mv pants u —Slick Willie — -People evervwhere should burn this hoot: in protest, buy some more and burn those, too!_ Shrillary GEAR...
...Take the Newsweek polls...
...ABC's George Stephanopoulos, a key strategist in Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, says that political scientists "talk about the bandwagon effect, that once a candidate gets in the zone, all of the coverage is good, almost no matter what happens, and when you're out of the zone, even when you do things right, it goes against you...
...The few polls that do show a clear winner have their own problems...
...Conversely, its sample following the September 30 debate showing a Kerry surge featured 36 percent Democrats, 34 percent Republicans, and 27 percent Independents...
...It used a methodology that describes a highly volatile electorate...
...Apparently, Newsweek was in a rush to release its poll on the same day it also conducted interviews, something other pollsters almost never do...
...Frankly, the Newsweek poll is more volatile than any electorate could possibly be...
...In recent years, election polls have often overestimated the Democrats' share of the vote...
...There are other reasons polls may tilt slightly toward Democrats...
...But 11 points of that swing is accounted for by Newsweek's wildly fluctuating partisan mix...
...How many people do you know who switched parties and their vote so late in the campaign...
...Some 9 percent of Americans now use cell phones as their primary telephone, and those numbers are more difficult for pollsters to contact...
...The best polls figure out if people are engaged enough to be likely voters...
...Turnout, which in 1996 fell below half of all adults, does matter...
...Unfortunately, polls help dictate media coverage.Reporters overemphasize certain elements of a candidate's personality—Kerry's verboseness or Bush's verbal flubs—if the polls turn against one or the other...
...POLITICS JOHN H. FUND Kill the Pollsters ftiUSED TO AGREE WITH SHAKESPEARE that first we kill all the lawyers...
...The Los Angeles Times poll found a one-point swing, as did Rasmussen Reports...
...Other polls don't show nearly the volatility of Newsweek's...
...In other words, the polls don't really prove who is ahead, which makes the excessive attention lavished on them bizarre...
...Bush still up by two points...
...Even if they do good work, the obsessive media coverage they receive is dumbing down our democracy...
...In 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 JOHN H FUND reality, about one-third of people who say that won't show up...
...John H. Fund, The American Spectator's Politics columnist, is the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...Newsweek's pollster says it did a final but unpublished survey that showed an 11-point margin...
...This makes survey results more uncertain, and should cause concern, caution and above all humility in reporting the results," says Leo Bogart, a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research...
...To do anything less risks heightening the cynicism of an electorate that increasingly feels it's being manipulated and not told the whole story...
...Too often the poll-obsessed nature of campaign coverage freezes public percep- ons of the candidates and provides a misleading picture of the presidential campaign...
Vol. 37 • November 2004 • No. 9
