A Washington Post poll reported a 10-point lead for the Democratic presidential candidate in 13 key “swing” states 16 days before the election. That candidate was John Kerry. That election year was 2004.
When Election Day 2004 arrived, “exit poll” trends reported to the public before the real polls closed also indicated that Sen. Kerry would win the White House. When the real votes were counted, he lost by more than 3 million votes to President Bush, though it took a relatively slim, 118,775-vote triumph in Ohio for the incumbent to win the Electoral College and keep his job.
So despite Sen. Kerry’s apparent inside track to victory, he was not elected president. And despite the significant edge Barack Obama has held over John McCain in most recent polls, particularly in “swing” states, he hasn’t won the presidency yet.
That’s a critical lesson learned across party lines long before 2004.
Mark Steyn has a nifty sentence on this from his column yesterday:
“According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show …[Obama]’s going to win.”
Ugh. I do hope people will vote and think for themselves…
‘Zackly what I been sayin’. Another commenter on a related thread here a couple of weeks ago started to get more and more riled with my pointing out exactly the 2004 results in Mark Steyn’s article. Many voters in “flyover country” simply don’t respond to or participate in polls. How could anyone find out how people who don’t participate in polls will vote? Take a poll? 😉
I hope so, too, Kendall. Voting is the way we decide this, not polling.
Polls have been all over the place as the ideas fluctuate and as the pollsters adjust the proportions of groups they think will vote. NOBODY knows who will actually vote, and that’s the key.
If anything, poll results reveal the need for those seeking office to have a firm set of principles and a grasp of the issues they aspire to deal with. Certainly an elected official is supposed to represent those of his district. But point is that he or she is supposed to represent the best interests of his district, not the pet cause of some noisy, active interest group within (or more likely outside) that district.
That takes courage and moral fiber, two qualities sorely lacking in these parlous times.
“NOBODY knows who will actually vote, and that’s the key”
—Katherine [#3]
Polls are a useful adjunct to democracy. Properly conducted polls can do a remarkably good job of gauging the electorate. But when turnout patterns change (or you face an anomaly like the Bradley Effect), pollsters have difficulty knowing what subset of adults to sample.
A caller on Rush Limbaugh stated the other day that she and others were urging everyone who came out of voting to say to any polster who asked that they voted for Obama. Then they were going to call in to the tv station during their call in program and announce what they had done, and declare the polls meaningless because they sabotaged the results, rendering them untrustworthy (or more so than they already are).
‘clever girl.
“‘Clever girl” —#6
Clever to devise an elaborate scheme of premeditated LYING?
None of us has to speak with a pollster. But if we do, we are not morally free to lie.
Re: #6 and #7 —
Moral arguments on lying aside, there’s also the fact that there are early reports indicating that certain brands of electronic voting machines have a “bug” that sometimes flips votes for Democratic candidates to Republican candidates (but, strangely, not the other way around.) Any state that uses these machines, and where the official result is markedly skewed from the exit polling, is going to be suspect.
In the event that a few such states go McCain’s way and he wins the election, you’re going to have about half the country believing that he was elected only because of massive election fraud. That’s not going to help his legitimacy. Assuming that McCain supporters want him to be able to actually govern if he is elected, then they might want to think twice before actively creating polling data which will damage his credibility.
#3, … way to go Katherine. Any poll taker that rings our doorbell or calls us up by phone get’s close to the same answer (in different words perhaps). “sir (or madam), with all due respect we firmly believe in the secret ballot and as such we believe it is none of your business!” So far they seem to smile, tip their hat and walk away, or hang up the phone – politely.
We’ve been through this the last two presidential elections, when the exit polls as leaked in the late afternoon and as used by the networks to project state winners turned out to be wrong. That was before anybody was talking about not telling the truth deliberately. Both times there were problems with the exit poll samples compared to the actual vote turnout, and also sample selection problems, that is, who was asked to take the exit poll and who accepted. In both 2000 and 2004 exit polls were only valid after the final vote totals became known and the samples could be adjusted to match the actuals. From either side, we ought to be extremely careful about believing exit polls and early projections unless the actual vote counts begin to substantiate the estimates.
Some analysts question whether the Bradley Effect actually existed, or, if it did years ago, whether it does now. The volatility of the polls should preclude anyone of good will from crying “racism” without some really solid evidence. There’s been too much of that already.
When we get polling calls at home, we politely decline to participate, and I wouldn’t do an exit poll either. However, as to the morality of giving false answers, I don’t know about that. The commandment is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” Against whom is a voter sinning if he gives flippant or wrong answers to a pollster? The poll-taker is not the police or FBI or even the U.S. census. The poll-taker is working for news media for whom many citizens now have scant respect. However, I agree that it may not be wise to try to mess up the polls, since feelings are running so high.
#8, if they had electronic voting machines in Chicago, I they would err in the Democratic direction. To portray vote fraud as a Republican specialty is blind. The method my area uses, optical-scan paper ballots, is far superior. It provides a hard-copy document and if a hand count is ordered the intent of the voter is very easy to determine.
#11 Katherine:
I certainly agree that optical-scan paper ballots are far safer than electronic voting machines as they are currently implemented. My state uses optical-scan ballots, and I’m glad that we do.
The sad thing is, there’s no fundamental reason you couldn’t build an electronic voting machine to produce an auditable hard-copy paper trail as it goes. In fact, properly implemented it could be better — easier to validate, harder to spoof — than straight paper ballots. But the machines that we have are terrible, and they’re prejudicing people against the entire concept of electronic voting when really the problem isn’t the concept, it’s bad implementation.
“If they had electronic voting machines in Chicago, they would err in the Democratic direction”
Very possibly.
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“To portray vote fraud as a Republican specialty is blind.”
That’s certainly correct. But many Republican election officials, in purchasing new post-chad equipment, displayed woefully blind enthusiasm for touch-screen systems that had poor security and no paper back-up. Those officials chose to ignore cogent evidence of how those systems were easy to tamper with and vulnerable to failure.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
“The method my area uses, optical-scan paper ballots, is far superior”
Optical scanning systems have some strong advantages: they’re relatively easy for voters to use; they check for overvotes; and the paper ballots provide a back-up.
The key issue here is protection against tampering. Critics demonstrated that they could easily defeat manufacturers’ much-touted proprietary security systems. (Manufacturers were reduced to arguing that fraud was unlikely because their systems would not be left unattended. But you could say the same of a traditional wooden ballot box.)
There’s no reason why, given current technology, voting devices shouldn’t be at least as tamper-proof as old-fashioned voting machines.
Frankly, I don’t see what was wrong with the machines where you go in, close the curtain, depress the lever next to the candidate’s name, open the curtain and your vote is counted.
Too much reliance on technology.
“I don’t see what was wrong with the machines where you go in, close the curtain, depress the lever next to the candidate’s name, open the curtain and your vote is counted” —LibraryJim [#14]
Nothing except that they’re old and heavy. But they are closer to tamper-proof than anything else you’ll find. Some localities (e.g., New York City) still use them for that reason.