The 'smartest' prove dumbest: why Kerry appeared to win Nov. 2nd

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by Orson, Jan 22, 2005.

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  1. Orson

    Orson New Member

    If you've read any of the MSM stories on the new report on exit polling, you "know" that nothing went wrong on November 2 - "move along" we're told by our Overlods and Masters.

    But in fact, the morning bias with the exit polls continued into the early evening, and could well have altered the outcome of a presidential election. Instead, these overpaid tendentious roids simply blame bloggers and bury the damning truth.

    "As late as 7:33 PM on election night, [National Election Pool] members and subscribers were sent 'weighted' data showing that Kerry was winning by 9 points among women and losing by 4 points among men; the next afternoon, the data was revised to show Kerry leading by only 3 points among women and losing by 11 points among men. When this was pointed out, [exit pollster] Mitofsky stuck to his guns, firing off an angry email to Mickey Kaus of Slate in which he insisted that 'the only ones confused were the leakers and the bloggers' -- a strange assertion, given that anyone watching the news on November 2 could see that everyone on camera thought Kerry was winning.

    "So what happened?


    "THE REPORT (AVAILABLE IN .pdf format here)

    is written to accentuate the positive. . . . ***But the inescapable conclusion that the report dances around is that a pro-Kerry bias in the data resulted from Edison/Mitofsky's over-reliance on poorly-trained young liberal activists to gather data."***

    SO, CHALK ANOTHER FIASCO up to liberal domination of our media institutions"

    "There was no problem with the precincts that Edison/Mitofsky chose to survey; comparing those precincts' actual vote totals to the actual vote totals of the states shows that they should have generated a good, balanced sample. (Putting paid to conspiracy theories about electronic-ballot rigging, the report also shows that 'precincts with touch screens and optical scan voting have essentially the same error rates as those using punch card systems.') Instead, the problem -- apart from a few technical glitches with the NEP computer system that showed up on election day -- was 'Within-Precinct Error' (WPE), mistakes in data-gathering made on the ground."

    IN OTHER WORDS, BIASED DATA GATHERING!

    "Younger interviewers' data had much higher WPE rates than older interviewers' -- a big problem, since 35% of interviewers were 24 or younger and 50% were 34 or younger.

    "One of the highest WPE rates came in the data collected by those interviewers with post-graduate degrees. This is a group that leans to the left on average. (According to Gallup, Bush won among those with college degrees and among those with some college, but lost among those with high school diplomas or less and among those with post graduate degrees; the most highly-educated tend to be Democrats, but the average Republican is more educated than the average Democrat.) Many interviewers got the job through recommendations from their college professors (speaking of left-leaning demographic groups); others found the job via listings on craigslist.com, a site heavily frequented by urban hipsters. Even assuming there was no deliberate fudging of the numbers going on -- something I'm perfectly willing to assume -- there's little doubt that many of these interviewers had a demeanor that absolutely screamed liberal. Small wonder that Kerry voters would be more likely to talk to them.

    Training ought to have overcome these 'learned' and under-aged mistakes, but "fully 77% of interviewers had never worked as exit poll interviewers, and most worked alone. Their training, such as it was, consisted of a twenty-minute phone call and an interviewer manual sent by Fed-Ex along with the polling materials."
    http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7664

    -Orson
     

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