Posted on 11/09/2004 8:27:43 AM PST by mrustow
Just because it was November, didn't mean that the Kerry camp and its network shills couldn't come up with some more "October surprises." After all, for the Democrats and their media affiliates, it's always October.
No Exit
On Election Day, the early returns from the Big Media-commissioned "exit polls" were that Sen. John Kerry was drubbing Pres. Bush across the East, especially in the two states Bush had to carry, Florida and Ohio, if Bush was to have a chance at winning the election. Keep in mind, that unlike the network election coverage, which begins in earnest only after the polls close, the exit polls start coming out early in the day, hours before the polls close.
As Dick Morris pointed out, there is no excuse for bad exit poll data. The problem with many polls during the campaign is that pollsters frequently include all eligible voters, rather than only likely voters. The opinions of eligible voters who won't be voting tell us nothing about the likely results if the election were held that day, and are thus worthless and misleading. In an exit poll, you know the respondent has voted. And exit pollsters know not to interview disproportionate members of any one group. Once you have your quota on female voters, for instance, you stop interviewing females. Similarly, in an unsigned story from Newhouse/Knight Ridder that ran in the November 4 Seattle Times, political scientist Dennis Simon of Dallas' Southern Methodist University argued, "If we go back in history to prior presidential elections, those exit polls were dead on. Something has changed to make them less dead on."
The unnamed reporter asked, "What went wrong with those exit polls?
"'I don't know, said [Democrat] pollster John Zogby, who relied partially on exit polls Tuesday to declare Kerry the winner in Ohio. 'I'm not blaming everything on the exit polls, but the exit polls were terrible.'"
Joe Lenski, whose Somerville, New Jersey company, Edison Media Research, conducted the $10 million new exit poll system for Big Media, has complained that people were asking too much of exit polls, which he now insists are useful only in predicting landslides. But the exit polls were reliable in the past, and if they were worthless in predicting close races, the networks, major newspapers, and AP would never pay so much for them. Somehow, I doubt that Lenski sells media conglomerates on paying his firm thousands of dollars per client, based on the notion that his exit polls are worthless in calling close elections. Media outlets don't need expensive exit polls for a blowout. If the networks can't call races before election officials can, then no one watches their broadcasts, and advertisers withhold their patronage. Big newspapers need accurate exit polls in close races, so that their reporters can start writing their stories early enough to make deadline, so that the paper can have a worthwhile product out in time for the next day that people will buy, and which will continue to attract top-dollar advertisers. The various commercial interests, as I see them, are complementary. They do not, however, complement the political interests of leftwing reporters and editors.
As the anonymous Newhouse/Knight Ridder author pointed out, the phony exit poll numbers affected not only the news coverage during Election Day, but even the financial markets. The numbers spread like wildfire on the Internet through bloggers.
Some observers -- including Eric Burns of Fox News Watch -- have pointed to the spreading of the bad exit numbers as the undoing of the "bloggers," who had been riding high since they unmasked the Memogate/Rathergate hoax. There is a problem with this scenario, however. Burns et al., use the generic term "bloggers," without regard to the essential distinctions between different bloggers and other netizens. While a number of bloggers eventually helped unmask Memogate/Rathergate, the hoax wasn't initially revealed by bloggers at all, but by posters at the Republican Free Republic Web site. And whether bloggers or posters, Memogate/Rathergate was exposed entirely by conservatives and Republicans, not by generic "bloggers."
There is a subculture of socialist and communist bloggers, but they deserve none of the credit for fact-checking that the media have given to them as part of the amorphous set of "bloggers." The presidential campaign was characterized by one journalistic hoax after another that the SMSM foisted on the public, in order to win the election for John Kerry, and by the SMSM's initial refusal, born of the same motive, to cover stories such as the Swift Boat Vets. Leftwing bloggers weren't providing a corrective to such propaganda, they were spreading it! Similarly, the phony exit poll numbers were largely spread by leftwing bloggers. At the risk of sounding like a Republican hack, the rightwing bloggers have been serving as a corrective to the SMSM; the leftwing bloggers have served as the SMSM's accomplices.
The reason why that should be the case is simple: Blogs rose in influence as a Republican and conservative antidote to the routine bias and fraud of the socialist mainstream media (SMSM), whose members see themselves as pillars of the Democrat party. Leftwing blogs have no such corrective function. Note the parallel to talk radio. Although there has always been liberal talk radio -- think, Larry King -- conservative/Republican talk radio took off, because right-of-center voices were censored and persecuted in the SMSM and academia. Leftists have so many "mainstream" outlets to satisfy their political needs that they don't feel the need to support outlets like Air America or spend hours each day visiting Web sites; on the other hand, outside of Fox News, rightwing Americans have to live on talk radio and the 'Net.
This political split within the media is not news, but rather a case of "the more things change ..." In sociologist Max Weber's (1864-1920) Politische Soziologie (Political Sociology), a book within his huge, posthumously published magnum opus Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), he took it for granted that each political party would have its own media organs. While journalism professors still claim publicly to believe in the "ideal of objectivity," in practice, what they consider "objective" is too often identical to what they think will help the Democrat party.
So far, two possible and two baseless explanations, respectively, have been offered for the exit poll/real poll discrepancy: 1. The exit pollsters fudged their numbers, to make it look like Kerry was beating Bush, so as to discourage Bush supporters who had not yet voted from going to the polls, and bringing about a self-fulfilling prophecy (my theory); 2. According to the American Spectator's "Prowler," the phony exit poll numbers were not from the exit pollsters at all, but were counterfeits that had been packaged by the Kerry campaign to fool "everybody" (on the Left), and then spread via leftwing bloggers and Web sites; 3. Democrat talking point: "Mean" Republican voters skewed the exit poll results, by refusing to speak to pollsters; and 4. Kerry supporters (including an e-mail one of them sent to me, and which sounds like something out of democraticunderground.com's conspiracy factory) insist that the exit poll numbers were the real deal, and were only countered through massive, Republican election fraud.
Actually, there were two different sets of bad exit poll numbers: phony and phonier. The phony numbers came from Joe Lenski's "legitimate, professional" exit poll, while the phonier ones came from a Democrat hoax.
As Dennis Simon observed, the exit polls used to work just fine. And as John Zogby rued, the 2004 numbers were "terrible."
As the Times' Jim Rutenberg reported on November 5,
"The new system was engineered to avoid such problems. It was built by the National Election Pool, a consortium of the major television networks and The Associated Press, after an earlier set-up, the Voter News Service, helped lead the networks to call the state of Florida in the 2000 election first for Al Gore, then for George W. Bush, then for neither. The system broke down almost entirely on Election Day 2002."
Let's see. When Bill Clinton was winning national elections during the 1990s, there were no problems with the exit polls. But once Republicans started winning one election after another, the exit polls, old and new, either produced worthless numbers or crashed altogether, as the VNS did in 2002. I'm sure that's all just a big coincidence.
For the "phonier" numbers explanation, consider the report by "Prowler" at The American Spectator.
"According to at least three sources, one inside the Kerry campaign, and two outside of it, but with ties to senior Kerry advisers, some of the ‘early polling numbers’ were in fact direct reports from Kerry campaign or Democratic Party operatives on the ground in such critical states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. According to a Washington lobbyist with knowledge of the numbers, the numbers were packaged together so as to appear to be exit poll results. They were then scrubbed through several sources to land in the lap of sympathetic bloggers who these operatives believed would put the numbers up with little question.
[Numbers laundering?]
"Some of the numbers claimed to be exit polling data that showed Kerry with a 8-1 voter ratio. As soon as the numbers hit the Internet, panic set in."
The American Spectator report fits in nicely with what we know about the Kerry campaign's manipulation of the election after midnight (see the last section below). It appears that the exit pollsters and the Kerry people engaged in separate dirty tricks, each doing their bit to help the Party.
If claim #3 is anything but the unwittingly comical expression of the shamelessness, rage, and desperation of Democrats and their media comrades, I'd love for someone to explain it to me. Note that the "mean Republicans" explanation comes from pollster Joe Lenski Himself, the same guy who said that exit polls are unreliable to begin with. Well, which is it, Joe? The exit poll data is meaningless in a close election, but the mean GOP voters screwed it up? That reminds me of the Woody Allen joke about the guests complaining in the Jewish hotel: Guest A: "The food here is terrible." Guest B: "Yeah, and the portions are so small."
As for claim #4, I'd like to see its supporters' evidence.
Remembering Florida, 2000
In 2000, all of the networks called Florida for Democrat candidate Al Gore after the polling places in the state's Eastern Time Zone had closed, but while the polls were still open in the rabidly pro-Bush Panhandle, which is in the Central Time Zone. In the Panhandle, Gore voters are about as scarce as Bush voters are in Philadelphia. It is highly likely that thousands of Bush voters, upon hearing that the race was lost, were discouraged from voting.
While the 2000 early call in Florida did not cause the 36-day Democrat siege of America, including the chad scam, it did make it easier for the Democrats and their media lackeys to sell the siege.
The official count, whereby after several recounts, George W. Bush won Florida by only 537 votes, is nonsense on stilts. Democrat Florida election officials fraudulently took over a thousand Bush ballots and "reinterpreted" them as Gore votes. In some cases, the fraud was obvious; in other cases, officials handled ballots so much that, as one observer noted, the chads eventually gave way. Several thousand felons, over 70% of whom registered as Democrats, voted illegally; several hundred students attending segregated, black colleges engaged in voting fraud, by voting both from their home and their college addresses; and a few thousand military ballots, which were heavily Republican, were never counted. Hence, Bush’s Florida margin of victory should legally have been ten times what it was, without even speculating on the Panhandle losses.
As I wrote on November 13, 2000, in my Toogood Reports column, "Jesse Jackson on How to Steal a Presidential Election, and Live Happily Ever After," at the end of election night, at 4 a.m., a weary Peter Jennings of ABC News interviewed an exhausted Jackson, who talked in slogans:
"Bush, Cheney, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, this is the same thing, states' rights, the denial of a woman's right to choose, attacks on affirmative action ..."
At no time did Jackson say, "Peter, this so-called victory by George Bush is nothing but a case of voter fraud. My associates and I have been fielding calls all day from black Florida voters who were intimidated out of voting, or barred from polling places ..."
By November 9, the Rev. Jackson had heard yet more voices. According to Left-of-Castro columnist, Juan Gonzalez, in the November 10 New York Daily News, "As the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me yesterday, it may be that the television networks projected Florida's results correctly the first time, but failures in the voting systems of Palm Beach and Broward Counties led to thousands of Gore votes not being counted."
But how could thousands of Gore votes be counted, if the voters were barred from, or intimidated out of voting?
Apparently, the 2000 Florida Disenfranchisement Hoax was either formulated in the middle of election night by Gore campaign strategists, or more likely, had been earlier formulated as an electoral fail-safe, to be unleashed the day after a close election. In any event, Jesse Jackson clearly didn't receive his talking points until sometime between 4 a.m. the night of the election and noon the day after.
All sorts of wild stories surfaced. Al Gore's black campaign manager, Donna Brazille, insisted that Florida police had kept black voters from the polls with guns and dogs. Though Brazille was guilty of foisting a stupendous lie on the world, she did not suffer. One month later, she was a guest on Ted Koppel's ABC News show, Nightline, where she was treated with respect by Koppel, who never brought up her little exercise in racial arson.
Democrats used the legal system to subvert the law, e.g., demanding that Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris not abide by the legal deadline for recounting ballots, and then using the Democrat-dominated Florida Supreme Court to run roughshod over Florida state law.
Since November 2000, the Democrat party and its house organs such as the New York Times, have kept hoax alive, and preserved Florida as an example of how to try and steal an election. Indeed, John Kerry announced several months before the election, that he would contest the results in Florida. However, Kerry was beaten so soundly in the Sunshine State that apparently he and his brain trust decided to do to Ohio, what the Gore campaign had done to Florida four years earlier.
If calling a state one hour early could have such far-reaching consequences, imagine the mischief that "calling" many states several hours early through fraudulent exit polls could do.
See What the Boys in the Boiler Room Will Have
As I reported in my previous column, although shortly after midnight George W. Bush had clearly captured Ohio, and thus the election, Dan Rather refused all the night to call Ohio for Bush, and ABC did likewise.
On November 4, the New York Times' Jodi Wilgoren explained why CBS and ABC had refused to acknowledge that Bush had won Ohio, and thus the election.
"The critical moment came at 12:41 a.m. Wednesday, when, shortly after Florida had been painted red for Mr. Bush, Fox News declared that Ohio - and, very likely, the presidency - was in Republican hands.
"Howard Wolfson, a strategist, burst into the 'boiler room' in Washington where the brain trust was huddled and said, 'we have 30 seconds' to stop the other networks from following suit.
"The campaign's pollster, Mark Mellman, and the renowned organizer Michael Whouley quickly dialed ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC - and all but the last refrained from calling the race through the night. Then Mr. Wolfson banged out a simple, two-line statement expressing confidence that Mr. Kerry would win Ohio once the remaining ballots were counted.
"'What was driving our decision making was the memory of how in 2000, by allowing Florida to go for Bush, a lot of momentum was blocked,' said one person who was in the room. 'Our whole goal was stop the train from moving that way.
"Train stopped, lawyers and strategists at the campaign's Washington headquarters prepared court papers to challenge Ohio's process for counting provisional ballots, and made spreadsheets comparing each county's provisional ballots with its margin of victory or defeat."
It didn't occur to Wilgoren that anything was wrong with Democrats' successful hijacking of election night coverage.
And look at what her source told her: "What was driving our decision making was the memory of how in 2000, by allowing Florida to go for Bush, a lot of momentum was blocked. Our whole goal was stop the train from moving that way."
"By allowing Florida to go for Bush"? Clearly, these people think that they can use the media to make a state fall their way.
In 2000, the networks called Florida for Gore while the polls were still open in the Panhandle. That violation of proper practice "stopped the train," alright. But the networks only called the state for Bush long after the polls had closed all over the state, which had no effect on voting -- lawful voting, that is.
And after midnight EST in 2004, with the polls long closed, withholding the Ohio results was not going to lead to more voters lawfully voting in the Buckeye State. The only actions that could yet have taken place involved illegal or legal chicanery. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at Kerry headquarters!
"... lawyers and strategists at the campaign's Washington headquarters prepared court papers to challenge Ohio's process for counting provisional ballots ..."
The Kerry campaign was counting on those provisional ballots. How then, could they challenge the process for counting them? It sounds as though they had taken Democrats' preferred method of election fraud from 2000, the "reinterpretation" of key-punch ballots for Bush or with no vote as Gore votes, and projected it onto the provisional ballots. Jacques Derrida, who denied the objective meaning of texts (and said that everything is a "text"), and gave all power to interpreters, may be dead, but his spirit lives on in the Democrat party.
If FCC chief Michael Powell has any cojones, he will investigate the collusion between the Kerry campaign and ABC and CBS. And those of us concerned with such corruption must beat the drum from now until 2008, reminding voters that exit polls are just another form of Democrat disinformation.
In early July, Evan Thomas, Newsweek's longtime Assistant Managing Editor noted on the PBS show Inside Washington,
"There's one other base here: the media. Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards -- I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox, but -- they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there's going to be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." (A tip of the hat to the Media Research Center.) At the time, I thought I'd heard the quote as "five percent," because while five percent was perfectly believable, 15 percent was not. Now, I'm no longer sure that the SMSM media bias was worth even five points in the election. I now believe that many voters voted not against John Kerry, but against the media. While the majority of white, Christian Evangelicals voted FOR George W. Bush, millions of voters who supported him were voting AGAINST other people and policies, rather than for Bush: Against gay marriage, against a Democrat party whose patriotism is suspect, and against an anti-American SMSM. Ultimately, the media may have won the election -- but not for the candidate whom they thought they were helping!
Yup. One time could be a fluke, but three times in a row ...?
Bumpbackatcha!
Conservative, not Republican. There's certainly a difference.
I'd love to debate the issue with you, but then I'd get banned.
Probably why you became a conservative.....just so you could be right.
I hope there is an investigation and something is done but I am not holding my breath.
I'm afraid you're right. After all, if the Bush brothers didn't take any action against massive, felony, election fraud in Florida in 2000, why would they do anything now against something much more legally ambiguous?
Probably why you became a conservative.....just so you could be right.
Thanks for making me laugh out loud for the first time today!
Why should not these people be thrown in jail. What they attempted to do is overthrown the legitimately elected government of the United States by lawlessness, chicanery, and deceit. Conspiracy to defraud the citizens of the U.S. by unlawful means. I am as serious as I can be.
It'll never happen. The same people who supported unconstitutional "campaign finance reform," would scream bloody murder about their precious First Amendment rights. However, you could investigate them -- but as another FReeper said above, don't hold your breath.
LOL!
This is the one week celebration of the BUSH VICTORY!
It's a Happy Feet Day!
I appreciate your seriousness and agree with you, but please see #25 above. I just don't see George Bush doing what needs to be done. And down the road, when the GOP has a less attractive candidate and the Dems have a more attractive one, the Dems are going to steal a close election using this method.
Well, here's something people have a gut smart about and have had for years. Personally, I never needed to have it spelled out for me so precisely, but it's nice to see that the verifiable facts bear out what your gut always told you.
That's why God gave us the Internet. (That, and to test our love for our wives and children.)
Bumpbackatcha!
Zogby, Soros, Moore, Mcaulif, irrelevant never were's......
If this is true, why didn't the Elite Media Group, who was performing exit polling for the major networks, disavow these bogus numbers? Why didn't they say, "Hey, these aren't our numbers. We don't know where they're coming from." Were they not aware?
Europeans are the perfect argument against the supposedly liberating effects of formal education. They were better educated than us in 1933, and they're better educated than us now. And yet, they're a bunch of gullible, weak-willed fools.
Notice also the media is not reporting the new WIDER popular vote margins.
It blew me away, when a FReeper posted new vote totals two days after Election Day showing Bush had gained an additional 1.1 million vote advantage. I thought, as did the Kerry people, that ALL of those late votes were supposed to veer left. There must be some trucks full of counterfeit voting machines and "provisional" ballots that never got to their destinations.
I like it! SMSM describes it exactly.
At this point that's just a rumor. I heard it just after Election Day as a hypothesis as to how the exit polls could have been so far off. But I don't think it's necessary to outrun the evidence. My hunch is that the pollsters did all the work.
"Howard Wolfson, a strategist, burst into the 'boiler room' in Washington where the brain trust was huddled and said, 'we have 30 seconds' to stop the other networks from following suit.
I don't doubt this at all. Anyone who took statistics in college could so the same calculations Ed Bradley did on CBS. It was pathetic to see the MSM "news" people not report the obvious "news" fact that Bush had won reelection.
If this is true, why didn't the Elite Media Group, who was performing exit polling for the major networks, disavow these bogus numbers? Why didn't they say, "Hey, these aren't our numbers. We don't know where they're coming from." Were they not aware?
Those are excellent questions that the rest of us would do well to keep repeating, louder and louder, since otherwise, the SMSM and the folks at Elite will simply "move on."
""If we go back in history to prior presidential elections, those exit polls were dead on. Something has changed to make them less dead on."
This is an easy one. Historically there were a greater number of housewives who voted early. Now many more women work, and there are a far greater number of unemployed who vote early. Unemployed tend to vote Democrat where housewives were split more evenly. Unless employment status is taken into account, early voter poll samples will continue to favor Democrats.
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