[Strategerist]

Just as a note Fox isn't a polling firm. They contracted with a polling company (name escapes me, but it might actually be one of the other ones you looked at) for their polls.

[StJacques]

I'm sorry I don't have more time to look into this right now, but I'll bookmark this for later. I believe Survey USA was off on Florida and maybe Ohio, as well as a couple of others. I have some stuff bookmarked and written down that I can go over to verify this, so I do not advance my statements as a fact. But I will come back after I check these things out.

And I suggest you Google a search on Rasmussen and its accuracy. I do remember quite well that the post-election analysis was that they topped the pollsters.

I'll check in later.

[Brimack34]

Who needs a polling firm. Cheney said it would be 51% to 47%

[InTheRight]

In all fairness, Florida was not easy for anyone to poll this year, due to the hurricanes hitting predominately Republican areas.

Zogby was the joke of the year. He called the race for Kerry last spring, and then kept a consistent bias to the left all year. In an effort to make his final numbers correct, he announced that his final predictions would be released at 5:00 p.m. on election day. He later admitted that he used the early exit polls in making his final predictions, which was a joke on many levels. First of all, he is supposed to be a pollster himself. Why was he depending on exit polls? Secondly, within a few minutes of the earliest wave of exit polls being released, many on the net were crunching the numbers, and realizing they were seriously flawed. How on earth did he not notice this himself? Thirdly, even with his cheating by using early exit polls in his final "predictions" he still came up with one of the worst predictions. His career is over, which is why he's now going to do everything possible to try to make his numbers look better. He started the day after the election by using one of his earlier polls as his final prediction, which directly contradicted his Nov. 1 statement that his final numbers would come out at 5:00 on Nov. 2.

[Deetes]

I keep hearing this name zogby.Who dat be ;)

I think FOX uses Opinion Dynamics ...

[southernnorthcarolina]

Good work; much appreciated.

You touched on it with respect to Gallup, but one thing that's always bugged me is that the only way to judge a polling organization's accuracy is to compare its final survey to the actual results. I don't think there's any way that swings anything like as big as those shown by Gallup (among others) actually took place, but there's no way to know. I'm sure it has crossed the minds of many that some of the wild fluctuations were agenda-driven.

[Texas_Jarhead]

Nice job. Thanks for posting.

[geedee]

You done good, Dangus.

One of these days the politico wackos are gonna smell the roses and realize us pajama-clad FReepers are the ONLY analysts worth a damn. Hell's fire, Buckhead already showed cBS they'd best not try to blow any smoke up our patoots any longer. And hundreds of other FReepers, maybe thousands, have exposed lie after lie just during just this past year alone.

And they call us dumb? I'd love for there to be an honest BRAINPAN comparison between their best and brightest versus our own John Huang, MiaT, anniegetyourgun, Grampa Dave, Congressman Billy Bob, you, etc. I don't ALWAYS agree with my fellow FReepers but most of them suckers are MENTAL GIANTS compared to the Liberal mental-midgets like Maureen Dowd and Dan Blather.

Hell, I'm even smarter than I thought I was. LOL. I went here a couple of months ago and took their free, online IQ test and it's quite obvious to me that Free Republic has made me smarter. I made sure to email my results to ALL my family and challenged them to either measure up or join Free Republic.

We're a smart bunch here.

[GoMonster]

Appreciate your analysis. However, may want to spend more time. Survey USA which has had good track record in state by state in the past was at best just ok this year. Really state by state Rasmussen's change model worked with Mason Dixon as the best. SUSA was off in a couple of states. Also, note Fox uses Opinion Dynamics which is ironically run (polling) by a Demorat. Zogby really sucked. Gallup also was pretty bad at the end. Battleground did well also.

[RoseofTexas]

Very interesting....Marked for later read!

[oldbrowser]

Out of 11 polls, Bush under-performed in 8 and over-performed in none of them

Huh? Wouldn't it be better to state that 8 of 11 polls overestimated the actual results for Bush?