Introducing The New Polling Firm of Madoff, Marist, Quinnipiac and Ponzi

Townhall.com ^ | September 29, 2012 | Hugh Hewitt

[Kaslin]

After a few weeks spent tracking down and questioning pollsters and the reporters of polls, I can assure the reader that pollsters are the modern-day alchemists. They promise to turn numbers into predictive gold. We'd all like to believe these magical powers exist, but we shouldn't. The pollsters of 2012 just don't know who is going to win in November any more than did the pollsters of 1980 know that Ronald Reagan was headed towards a landslide in that late-breaking year.

I'd like to believe Scott Rasmussen that the race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is tied. Democrats would like to believe Quinnipiac (used by the New York Times and CBS) or Marist (used by the Wall Street Journal and NBC) that Obama has surged to a lead in Ohio and other key battleground states. They'd also like to believe that Gallup's finding that the president has a six-point lead among registered voters means a six point win in five weeks.

But none of these beliefs are good journalistic practice.

(Gallup's tracking poll changes to a "likely voter screen" next week, and then it will make the most sense to average Rasmussen and Gallup and conclude that is the true "state of the race," though even that average is still subject to incredible volatility in the closing five weeks of the campaign.)

There are plenty of data points to encourage Republicans, and these are genuine data points as opposed to the junk food offered up by Quinnipiac and Marist, which derived their predictions from samples that included enormous Democratic voter margins in key states, pro-Democratic turnout margins that were even greater than those achieved in Obama's blowout year of 2008..

Two data points that warm GOP hearts and undermine the junk polls: (1) Absentee requests in Ohio by Democrats are trailing their 2008 totals --often by a lot in key Democratic counties like Cuyahoga County; and (2) overall voter registeration for Democrats in the Buckeye State is down dramatically from 2008.

These two bits of info undermine the credibility of the Obama booster polls, as did the interviews I conducted with key leadership from both polls and with other informed observers.

The data on absentees and registration point to a fall off in enthusiasm for the president from the highs of 2008, a result both of his epic failures as president and of the fact that the second time around isn't nearly as exciting as casting a vote for the first ever African-American president.

The conversations with the experts are the most revealing, however, and the Manhattan-Beltway media elite has really failed to do even minimal homework here, choosing instead to go with the conclusions of the people they have paid to give them data, thus outsourcing their work.

In this respect big media resembles nothing so much as investors in Bernie Madoff's funds. Madoff never got asked tough questions by his investors or the SEC, and thus he rampaged through his clients' cash.

Big news organizations that turn off their skepticism and write checks to polling firms are doing the same thing and for the same reason: They lack the skills to do their own analyses, and they don't want to be thought stupid for asking obvious questions.

I don't mind admitting I don't know why a sample should include 10% more Democrats than Republicans, so I ask --and ask and ask. This is what journalists do. Unless, apparently, they have paid for the product or want badly to believe it is true.

But don't believe me. Read the interviews.

Here's the transcript of the conversation I had with Quinnipiac's Peter Brown from early August.

Here's the transcript of the conversation I had with Marist's Lee Miringoff from mid-September..

I have talked polling with Michael Barone twice, on September 17 and onSeptember 26, and once with the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost, also onSeptember 26.

I also spent a lot of time with the National Journal's Director of Polling Reporting, Steven Shepard, on Septmeber 25, and that transcript is here.

Here are the key takeaways from all these conversations.

The pro-Obama pollsters don't have answers as to why their skewed samples are trustworthy beyond the fact that they think their approach to randomness is a guarantee of fairness, and they seem to resent greatly that the questions are even asked. Like Madoff would have resented questions about his stunning rate of return.

Barone notes that percentage turnout by party in a presidential year hasn't been much greater for the president's party than it was in the preceding off-year, which makes samples outstripping even the 2008 model of Democratic participation "inherently suspicious.".

Cost notes that Romney is winning the independent vote in every poll, which also makes big Obama leads suspect.

And my conversation with Mr. Shepard, whose employer National Journal has a reputation for the best non-partisan work inside the Beltway, didn't find any academic, disinterested support for the proposition that party identification cannot be weighted because of the inherent instability of the marker.

The biggest unanswered question of all: If party ID is so subject to change that it should not be weighted according to an estimate of turnout, why ask about it at all? And if it is for the purpose of detecting big moves, as Mr. Shepard argued, why not report that "big move" in the stories that depend upon the polling?

Over the next few weeks, the junk polls will start tweaking their samples and dancing around that fact in order to come closer to reality. Too late. The sample controversy has penetrated into the public's mind, and Quinnipiac and Marist are marked as either rubes or rogues unless the huge democratic turnout advantage materializes on November 6.

In the meantime, if you see a story on a poll that doesn't tell you the partisan make-up of the sample, note to yourself that the reporter is missing the most interesting bit of data to most readers.

Just as Bernie Madoff used to hide the real story.

[Yo-Yo]

Ok, I confess. Part of the Democratic oversample is my fault. I’ve been called at least 5 times by Quinnicpiac in the past two weeks, and I refuse to answer when I see their name on my caller ID.

[pie_eater]

One of the big pollsters was interviewed yesterday (unfortunately I don’t remember which one)and he said that only 9% of all people called complete the poll. So isn’t it statistically dubious to draw conclusions about the preferences of the other 91% by the 9% who either don’t have caller ID or something better to do than stay home and answer polls?

[ez]

Zogby was once the King of Pollsters until he started adding his “special sauce.” Look where he is now ... a bad joke. I think he was an MB plant all along, just like his brother. There are plenty of snake-oil salesman who would love to tell you what to believe...

[dalebert]

I hung up twice and they hung up thrice

[Kaslin]

My phone has a audio caller ID and plus I can see the number on my monitor with my MagicJack devise. I don’t answer any calls from numbers I do not recognize and always do a Google search for them. This is the only time I use Google for

[rhinohunter]

Zogby was once the King of Pollsters until he started adding his “special sauce.”

Yep...I can remember back in the 90's when Zogby was Rush's goto guy for accurate polling. Then Zog started hitting the special sauce and it's been all downhill ever since. Now, he's an even bigger joke than Pew.

[Kaslin]

I believe I saw that, but don’t remember either who it was. Could it have been Pat Cadell?

[MrDem]

I’ve been called and I always refuse to participate. I think many conservatives underpoll because we value privacy much more than so than the libtards, who are eager to tell everyone every detail of their lives via Facebook and twitter.

“I’m eating a cheeseburger...”
“I’m getting in my car...”
“I just left the hamburger place...”
“I’m going to the mall...”

[gotribe]

So basically the sample is of people who take time for the survey and who are more likely to associate themselves with Democrats.

[Islander7]

I was called once, years ago. I did not finish the poll becasue the questions were so obviously biased toward the desired result.

Poll ‘results’ today are used to skew public opinion, not reflect public thought.

[JPG]

Zogby jumped the shark with his enthusiastic cheerleading for Effin Kerry in ‘04. He was so out of it that even his fellow rats scurried away from him.

[Raycpa]

I read one of the interviews

http://www.hughhewitt.com/transcripts.aspx?id=b6dcdfd8-662f-4c5c-b199-2c7601ec818b

and now I understand the possible source of sample error. They are not deliberately taking the results and adjusting the data down to a sample ratio.

They are predetermining the number of interviews using cell phones and land lines. The cell phone calls will over sample democrats. They claim they are looking for a certain percentage of cell phone calls in order to reach the population that does not have cell phones.

What they are missing is that they are indirectly skewing the polls toward democrats by predetermining the cell phone percentage.

I’m pretty sure this upfront allocation of cell phone calls to land line calls violates the randomness necessary to have a valid poll.

[thulldud]

Proverbs 18.2.

That fact alone would cause an oversampling of libs in any such poll.