Posted on 11/08/2004 12:00:54 PM PST by Cableguy
With most of the polls correctly predicting the winner, why were news outlets so quick to believe exit polls which are known not to have anywhere near the reliability? Even when actual vote totals came in, they were reluctant to get off the exit polls story. Is there any data out there whether the exit polls affected voting; maybe cost us some states?
I'm not surprised about M-D. They had a stellar record from 2002, as well. When M-D results come in, people listen.
Zogby and Gallup state polls were the pits. Gallup should get out of state polling completely.
I am surprised about Strategic Vision being off. Sometimes I relied on their results for optimism in what I thought would be a tight election. They were over optimistic for President Bush and need to balance their polling a little more.
I'm happy for Rasmussen after his 2000 Portrait of America disaster. With Ras and Survey USA automated polling now proven, looks like this is the way the polling will end up. It's cheaper and seems just as effective as human polling.
I don't disagree. Many of the pollsters were correct on the final result, within the margin of error. To try to declare that any one of that group was more or less accurate than another, based on only a single data point, is kind of silly, IMO.
Mason Dixon being top dog is no suprise, but the performance of the phonebots -- Rasmussen and SurveyUSA -- certainly was.
bump
Based on one bad year? Coming into this cycle, Gallup had a pretty good track record in statewide polling, based on the comparison data on SurveyUSA's website. They were in the top quartile in terms of accuracy before this year.
I agree that I prematurely wrote off Ras and SUSA. But Ras was right about the race being within MOE. Nothing wrong with publishing surveys everyday. That is how he makes his money.
I suppose. They do gold-standard national polls. I'm surprised that they flounder a bit with state polls. Rasmussen straightened up within 4 years so I guess they can to.
Don't forget the kids' vote - Weekly Reader!!
Zogby's behavior was disgraceful. He needs to pack it up after blowing 2 elections in a row.
Glad to see that the FOX/Opn Dyn was SOOO wrong.
Fox polls is a joke! I hope to never hear those bozos in ever of our news casts again.
They didn't claim W when it was 98% slam dunk until the very end.
What in the hell were they thinking?
Why is that?
The irony of it was that they were part of the cabal tht actually paid those libs to conduct those polls.
Will they learn to stop playing footsies with the left? I doubt it.
Don't know if it's true but NYPost reported today that CNN won the election night and day after ratings.
On the whole, Bush had a three percent lead for most of the polling season, except for the brief jump after the convention. That seems to have been more stable than most of the actual numbers.
It is interesting to note that a three percent lead in the popular vote doesn't necessarily win the election. You gotta have the swing states.
Failed to Project Winner: 44% | Average Error = 2.4
Huh? They polled 11 states (PA, OH, FL, MI, IA, WI, WA, NJ, GA, MN, CA) and got 7 right, a 36% error rate.
They missed MI and MN by calling a tie, and WI and MN by calling a slight Bush lead trending towards Kerry.
Strategic Vision's projections for a Bush win in MI and a tie in NJ, seems to provide evidence that, at least in these two states, they were skewing toward President Bush. Their polling in the other seven battleground states was reasonable, though except for Florida and Ohio, they consistently underestimated support for Senator Kerry.
They only called a tie in MI very late. They had Kerry consistently ahead most of the time, including 1 of their last 3 polls in the final 10 days. Both NJ and MI were also polls with lots of undecideds still left by the SV methodlogy.
The "underestimating" of Kerry support is debateable, sicne the obvious answer is that they could simply say the undecideds in their sample broke for Kerry 2 to 1, as in MI, NJ, and MN. Mostly, the understatement was by 1 point, as in IA, WA, and PA, while they overstated Kerry 2 pts in FL and 1 pt in OH.
Its wishful thinking of RCP to call Strategic Vision biased, but to take Research2000 and ARG as not being severly left-leaning in their bias.
Zogby should be horse-whipped.
How does one correctly pronounce "Goeas"?
Or, in Zogby's case, goat-whipped.
Is Zogby officially out of business now? How could anyone take his "work" seriously now? Just another DNC plant.
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