Again with the polls
Here’s a great post on polling. It manages to be highly informative, easy on the math, and funny too.
How is all that possible when you’re talking about polls? I wouldn’t have thought it could be done, but Charlie Martin seems to have accomplished it.
Please read the whole thing.
What we need is a poll tax. Tax the pollsters for every poll, and we could balance the budget in no time.
Seriously, I’ve never seen obsession with polls at this level before. I continue to believe that they are more about molding public opinion than reflecting it.
As most regulars here know I believe that Romney will win the Nov. 6th election. Since this is a thread about election polling, allow me one more opportunity to explain fundamentally why I believe a Romney win is inevitable.
Obama is un-American. That’s it purely and simply. This is not a “birther” comment, but cuts the the very essence of the Obama (Barack AND Michelle) vision of what America is.
They (and the left) both see this country as a country of unfairness, a country of inequality. Of course, it is precisely that, but the point they and the liberals miss is that it is precisely that fact which draws people here on a regular basis. In an unequal but free country each of us has the opportunity to grab grow and enjoy our own small piece of that inequality. Our ancestors arrived here precisely because they rejected the shared entropy that the left consistently tries to engineer. Again, it is in our DNA.
A recent Fox News poll indicates that 79% of Americans believe that everyone should pay some income tax, even if it is only 1%. In other words, Americans fundamentally believe that everyone should have “some skin in the game.” This message is one of the precepts at the core of our American exceptionalism and as a concept that flies in the face of those who believe that America has devolved into an entitlement mentality state.
Obama revealed his lack of understanding of this precise point when he mused that Americans believe in American exceptionalism just as Brits believe in Briitish exceptionalism, etc. He just doesn’t get it and the bulk of the elecotrate now knows that the he just doesn’t get it.
Yet Obama and the left keep pushing their message of the greedy robber-baron and an entitled lesser class (a retarditaire notion, BTW). No one likes the image of the robber-baron, but this country offers the promise that it is possible for any of us to become one. That is the difference, that is the point the left blindly dismisses and because of that I offer that Obama’s message falls on mostly deaf ears.
The proof of this pudding will be seen on November 7th the day after, when the election results are ascertained.
BUT, early voting has already begun in several states, including Iowa, where one hundred thousand early Democrat ballots have already been received by the Secretary of State. Maybe there will really be a huge turnout of Dems in Iowa, more than twice the number of Republican ballots. However, those early ballots are an open door to electoral fraud. They were the means of “electing” Frankenfraud in Minnesota, and thus of passing Obama Care. Someone needs to start checking the names and addresses. If more than one Donald Duck has already cast a Dem ballot, we have a very serious problem here, and we can not afford passivity. “If they mean war, let us give them war.”
and most recently regarding the polls from Instapundit (emphasis mine):
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/poll-averages-have-no-history-of-consistent-partisan-bias/
This article from the Pew Research Center supports my impression that people are more difficult to get a hold of.
http://www.people-press.org/2012/05/15/assessing-the-representativeness-of-public-opinion-surveys/
If only 9% of people are responding, the odds are high that the respondents have a Dem edge. Republican voters are much more likely to be married and much more likely to have kids. I find it very unlikely that people with more responsibilities are going to be equally as likely to agree to spend a lot of time on the phone answering pollsters — especially if they have a healthy skepticism toward pollsters to begin with.
stan: but attempts to study the demographic difference between responders and non-responders have found few differences, except on the subject of civic activity (responders have more). The link I just gave is to a lengthy study, very hard to wade through, but what I’ve found there is that although the study indicates little difference between responders and non-responders, it is not a study of political polls, but just of informational polls. I don’t know whether that matters, but it certainly could.