Posted on 11/02/2008 9:57:48 AM PST by FocusNexus
Reagan's landslide challenges the pulse-taker profession
For weeks before the presidential election, the gurus of public opinion polling were nearly unanimous in their findings. In survey after survey, they agreed that the coming choice between President Jimmy Carter and Challenger Ronald Reagan was "too close to call." A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders.
But when the votes were counted, the former California Governor had defeated Carter by a margin of 51% to 41% in the popular vote - a rout for a U.S. presidential race. In the electoral college, the Reagan victory was a 10-to-l avalanche that left the President holding only six states and the District of Columbia.
After being so right for so long about presidential elections - the pollsters' findings had closely agreed with the voting results for most of the past 30 years -how could the surveys have been so wrong? The question is far more than technical. The spreading use of polls by the press and television has an important, if unmeasurable, effect on how voters perceive the candidates and the campaign, creating a kind of synergistic effect: the more a candidate rises in the polls, the more voters seem to take him seriously.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Ah yes, the straw man argument. Well, the First Amendment has many exclusions and restrictions. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is one, canvassing/campaigning within a 100 feet of a polling station is another. In the case of both, the balance is between your right and the hardship imposed on others due to you exercizing your right. In each case, the balance is resolved in a common sense manner.
Voting it’s not a constitutional right. Show me where in the constitution such right is.
A great reminder! Bookmarked. thanks.
“See “1981 the pre election polls, a review” by CBS News.”
LINK? The article you are citing sounds more like the MSM trying to justify their total bias and being wrong.
THIS article says:
“For weeks before the presidential election, the gurus of public opinion polling were nearly unanimous in their findings. In survey after survey, they agreed that the coming choice between President Jimmy Carter and Challenger Ronald Reagan was “too close to call.” A few points at most, they said, separated the two major contenders.
At the heart of the controversy is the fact that no published survey detected the Reagan landslide before it actually happened. Three weeks before the election, for example, TIME’S polling firm, Yankelovich, Skelly and White, produced a survey of 1,632 registered voters showing the race almost dead even, as did a private survey by Caddell. Two weeks later, a survey by CBS News and the New York Times showed about the same situation.
Some pollsters at that time, however, were getting results that showed a slight Reagan lead. ABC News-Harris surveys, for example, consistently gave Reagan a lead of a few points until the climactic last week of October. “
“The vast majority of polls had Reagan winning as of the last week of the 1980 campaign. Some by a healthy margin. It is true that only one or two predicted the landslide of 10% but the result final result was not in doubt if you followed the polls. See “981 the pre election polls, a review”by CBS News.”
Your statement is COMPLETELY INACCURATE.
I found the article you are referring to and it says the opposite — it says what the TIME Mag article I just posted says, that the polls were wrong and Reagan surged in the last few days, but the polls DID NOT show that.
Here is the link for everyone to see.
THE 1980 PRE-ELECTION POLLS: A REVIEW OF DISPARATE METHODS AND RESULTS
Warren J. Mitofsky, CBS News
http://www.amstat.org/sections/SRMS/proceedings/papers/1981_011.pdf
“There has been much speculation about what went
wrong with the pre-election polls of 1980. All
the major published polls seriously understated
Ronald Reagan’s margin of victory over Jimmy
Carter (table i) based mostly on interviewing
completed late in the week before election day.”
The difference: Reagan had a debate the Thursday night before the election. That, of course, was the historice “there you go again” debate that fully displayed the Reagan charm.
Article IV. Section 4 - Republican government
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
The public opinion industry has christened Caddell's thesis the "big bang" theory of the campaign: 8 million voters moving to Reagan in 48 hours. To a large extent, most public opinion researchers support this theory, although many do so with major qualifications.
One thing this shows is what I’ve said in other threads: the media will never, never, never report poll results favoring the Republican candidate, at least at the Presidential level.
There are only two possible outcomes of a Presidential poll: either the Democrat is “comfortably ahead,” or the poll is “too close to call.”
Yes, the Constitution requires every state to have a republican form of government. However, the is no Constitutional right to vote for President or Vice President of the United States.
I still don’t see a constitutional right to vote for president of the US.
Vote ObamaObama is young. People who want to vote for him can vote for him in 2012, AFTER he has proven he can accomplish something positive.20082012!
He's got plenty of time to save the world, if that is his "destiny."
So far, Obama has given his Illinois constituents slums, homes they could not afford, bad schools, and abandonment of babies who survived abortion.
It's not a pretty picture.
Voters are making this decision for their children, too.
They should make sure they are not throwing away their children's birthright to be free to succeed.
Obama needs to be tested.
Read it more carefully — the point is the huge difference weightings can make. The polls they are showing with Reagan in the lead are “unweighted”, before the MSM manipulated them to show better numbers for Carter, which was published.
No doubt, the MSM will weight the polls to the disadvantage of the Republican candidate but even so the polls clearly indicated a Reagan lead. My own sense of how that election was going to go doing some private polling in my area indicated the landslide that actually happened. I do not have any such feeling of such a likely result in this election.
We don’t need a landslide, just a definite McCain win.
I think it’s still possible, even likely, IF the McCain voters get out and actually vote.
Otherwisze we might as well cancel all future elections, including this one, and let the MSM tell us, based on their biased polling, who will be our next president.
Thanks for that historical perspective. Do you have ANY indication that we are going to pull this thing off? Forget a landslide for McCain - even that he is going to win?
republic n 1 : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and is usually a president; also : a nation or other political unit having such a government 2 : a government in which supreme power is held by the citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives governing according to law; also : a nation or other political unit having such a form of government Source: NMW
In the context of the United States, both definitions apply.
As with Amendment X, the Founders didn't think that every single thing/detail had to be spelled out in simple English in order that it be comprehended by posterity.
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