Poll Tracks Dramatic Rise In Support for Gay Marriage (ABC News/Washington Post Poll)

ABC News ^ | 03/18/2013 | Gary Langer

[highball]

“but still when we put it on the ballot it fails? hmmmmm”

Except when it doesn’t. And last election, it went 4-for-4, a clean sweep everywhere it was on the ballot.

Plus there’s California, where it passed once with a strong majority, then again eight years later in a relative squeaker, and now I don’t know anyone who can suggest with a straight face that it would pass at all.

Better we face reality as it is, rather than kidding ourselves (again!) that the polls are somehow “skewed”. I’ve been saying for years that ballot results aren’t our strongest argument anyway, because they won’t always go our way. We need stronger arguments.

[cradle of freedom]

Some years back gays, I believe it was in New Jersey, tried to pass a law lowering the age of consent. NAMBLA openly pushes for sex with young boys and if anyone says that only some gays do that they should be asked whether they have ever heard a homosexual in the media denounce NAMBLA or the chickenhawks. They make a lot of noise about everything else but they are strangely silent on this issue.

Why is it that organized gayness has been pushing the Boy Scouts to accept gay scout masters and gay eagle scouts? They know that this is a danger to young boys but they do not care about them, they only care about their selfish agenda. This alone should make us disbelieve that they are all about goodness and light as they try so often to portray themselves.

[Ransomed]

Yeah, West VA is a strange bird. It is maybe the most conservative state to not have an amendment. Do they have a popular vote process there? The legislature failed to pass an amendment in 2009 if I recall, but I think they are a really long way from accepting ‘gay marriage.’

Freegards

[muawiyah]

PEW says response rates are down to 9%. let's say a dedicated organized group of as much as 1% is aware of this and that if they make every effort to always answer pollster calls (or do call backs) and maybe use 2 or more private phone numbers ~ their 1% can at least double it's power as part of the responses simply by having more than 1 phone number, and then multiply that power by 11 Times (100/9 = 11) ~ giving them 11 Times 2 or 22% of the total response for any poll.

If gays are as much as 1% of the population, they are easily 22% of the responses in polls. If they are 2%, they are 44% of the responses and if they are 3%, they are 66% of the poll responses.

So, do you imagine the homosexual lobby, the abortion industry svengalis, and the National Education Association would lose the opportunity to literally become the voice of America?

That's the source of the surprise turnaround~and it explains why polling is dead as a science in the determination of public opinion.

Everybody knows that ~ PEW, Post/ABC, etc. ~ all of them.

[Crucial]

I pfind myself moving in the opposite direction of this poll. The Left has simply immersed us in gay culture to make Americans more acclimated to gays. I really don’t care if someone is gay but government sanctioned gay marriage would be a disaster.

[highball]

polling is dead as a science in the determination of public opinion.

Yeah, that's why all those fake polls in late October had Obama winning the... wait a minute.

Look, burying our heads in the sand isn't the answer. We already tried that once before, with the "unskewed" nonsense, and what did it get us? A presidential campaign that sat back and rested, kidding itself that it was so far ahead it barely had to try.

We have to face reality if we are ever to have any hope of turning the tide. Otherwise the polls will continue to get worse and worse, gay marriage will win in state after state, and we'll still be sitting here saying "Everyone is secretly on our side."

[muawiyah]

You haven't been following things very well have you. All those polls that had Obama winning were based on several things ~ polling information that was discounted substantially, seat of the pants and gut feelings, and THINKING ABOUT IT A LOT and using whatever information sources outside of polls that seemed reasonable.

I did the same thing when i pronounced Romney's campaign DOA in March of last year.

I looked at a single instance of voting in a primary to come to the conclusion this dude was an elemental loser. That was the one right here in Virginia!n The history was hen had not been breaking 20% or 30% in a short series of primaries up against some regular Republicans. Then, his peeps in Virginia tricked things out so that he was the only guy up against Ron Paul.

What went from an exciting primary season turned into nothingness ~ outer darkness ~ the pits!

With these two alone on the ballot NOBODY wanted to vote ~ and we had an historically low turnout in a Virginia Presidential primary ~ barely 20% of the normal level of voters showed up.

Romney got about 60% of that 20%, or barely 12% of the total Republican vote that would normally be available to candidates to draw on!

HE DROPPED OFF HE PLANET. 12% that late in a primary season tells everyone that a candidate is in some serious trouble.

The other candidates held out to the extent of their money, but for some reason the DONORS decided Romney was their boy and loaded on the big bucks. Were these guys Democrats perhaps?

As unpopular as OBAMA was, he hadn't been pulling in 12% anywhere ~ END OF STORY.

Voting, not polling, demonstrated that Obama could easily beat Romney and that's what happened.

Rest assured the Democrat campaign handlers saw that situation in Virginia the same way ~ and made sure their candidate got plenty of physical exposure in the state ~ which was very easy since Virginia was on his line of travel from almost every other appearance in the country. WOODBRIDGE, VA which isn't even a real town, BECAME FAMOUS as a major candidate stop!!!!

[highball]

My comment was about the science of polling. You claimed it was dead, I say the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction.

You haven't been following things very well have you. All those polls that had Obama winning were based on several things ~ polling information that was discounted substantially, seat of the pants and gut feelings, and THINKING ABOUT IT A LOT and using whatever information sources outside of polls that seemed reasonable.

No. You're wrong.

All the polls that had Obama winning were based on sound methodology, solid statistical sampling, and real math. Borne out by the fact that, you know, Obama actually won. Just as the polls predicted.

To pretend otherwise is to invite the same trouble we had last time, where people here had convinced themselves Romney had already won, as had Romney himself. You wonder why he didn't bother with a ground game? Why should he, when the "unskewed" idiots convinced him he was winning huge?

Polling is a science. Not everyone paid to do it is good at it, but those that are should be listened to. It is hardly "dead as a science." It is instead crucial for us going forward; if we refuse to acknowledge reality, how can we ever hope to change it?

[muawiyah]

Sorry, the most accurate reports published by the pollsters were derived by processes much more akin to augery than to public opinion polling.

Even their pre-selection of a stratified sample of people to querry is subject to the same problem ~ not everybody answers their phone these days ~

[muawiyah]

The rest of your argument about 'skewed' polls is irrelevant. i think i spent a couple of hours working up materials debunking that black magic thinking.

So don't try to tar me with that one.

Frankly, I had some serious difficulty figuring out what most of those folks were saying ~ it was totally divorced from actual statistical sampling practice, and it didn't even have the best features of augury ~ a high pressure hose to wash off the pigeon poop after you'd examined it.

[highball]

You and Romney have a lot in common, then.

[muawiyah]

Did you read the posts I made? To arrive at that conclusion you'd have to imagine that I accepted any of them. They were all garbage, but, and many pollsters fessed up in the aftermath, they FILTERED the responses they were getting so they didn't have too many highschool kids cluttering up the results. Then they looked at trendlines, and as I have been telling people since 1997 on FR, if polling does anything, it gives you some trendlines that you might want to pay attention to ~ and that's simply because from poll to poll the same method has the same mistakes in it so you should be getting comparable results ~ and can find UP and DOWN.

The winning pollsters looked at their trendlines state by state, and recalling that Obama won in 2008 while McCain drew fewer votes than George Bush before him, simply looked for deviations from the pattern. A couple of them did notice that Obama's expected vote totals were going to decline ~ but by how much they didn't know ~ after all, polling can't tell them that, but they did hit that on the head.

The unskewing guys had so much mind numbing nonsense in their heads they had no idea what it meant that Romney was pulling well among homosexuals ~ only the guys who 'trimmed' responses understood that problem ~ except Gallup which was the very company that had, in effect, solicited homosexual overload on all their polls ~ those ol'boys were answering all pollster calls! With a 9% response rate in the aggregate, each deviation from the norm is worth 11X as much as a normal poll response (that's a punn BTW, but still true). Only pollsters who knew how to back the gay overload from the results could get even a half way decent view of which way the election was going.

[tom h]

Have faith, my friend.

None of this in new, and if you're a Christian you'll know that the Bible foretold that the world would be topsy-turvy someday.

Romans 1:25: "They exchanged the truth of God for a lie..."

Common yet true aphorism: "A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it; the truth is the truth even if no one believes it." Certainly applies to "gay marriage" here.

I don't give a hoot about the polls; gay marriage is still wrong and gay relationships are still immoral and unnatural.

[tom h]

That’s what the Book of Revelation is all about.

[tom h]

"Homosexuality and “gay marriage” is all about how people fornicate. Homosexuals cannot naturally conceive in any real way. This entire discussion is based on a false premise. I’m disgusted by this."

Hopefully you can take comfort in this eternal quotation. It is exactly why I couldn't give a d-mn about polls.

"A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if no one believes it."

After ten solid years of the media promoting homosexuality, I'm surprised that opposition to gay marriage is as high as it is.