The main stream media is suddenly publishing polls that show Obama surging ahead in battle ground states. The media is trumpeting these polls in an obvious attempt to encourage Obama supporters and discourage Romney supporters. But facts are stubborn things and here are the facts:
The polling industry has lost all credibility. The reason is quite simple. It all depends on who answers the phone. It doesn’t matter how many calls you make, if a significant percentage of people don’t answer the phone. History has shown some very consistent trends. Exit polls taken during an election are absolutely meaningless. They always show Democrats doing much better than final results. In 2004, exit polls had John Kerry winning Ohio. He lost big. In the Wisconsin recall election exit polls had this as a very close race. Anchors told us this was going to be a long evening. It wasn’t. All the networks called the race for Governor Scott Walker within the first hour.
Exit polls ask people who have just voted how they voted. It sure seems like this would be really accurate. But it isn’t. It isn’t because Democrats like to talk to people taking exit polls, but Republicans don’t. The same thing is true for political polls that telephone a lot of people. Republicans, who don’t want anything to do with those people doing exit polls, also don’t want anything to do with those people calling on the phone.
What really matters is this. We already know that about 90% of Democrats will vote for Obama and 90% of Republicans will vote for Romney. So far, the independent votes are leaning strongly toward Romney. Most long term polls, taken over months and years, show a pretty consistent split of 35% Democrat, 35% Republican and 30% Independent. If there is any movement, it is toward Republicans.
So, what matters is who actually votes. The pollsters are obviously assuming that because Democrats are answering the phones, they will show up at the polls. They think Democrats will surge to the polls in record numbers just like they did in 2008. If that is true, Obama wins. If it is not true, Romney wins.
Shortly after the polls closed in Florida in 2000, all the networks announced that, based on exit polls, Al Gore had defeated George Bush. The media asked George Bush for a reaction. He just smiled and said his people had been looking at their own data and he thought he would win Florida. The main stream media was stunned. I think they were expecting a concession speech. So they started looking at actual results, rather than exit polls and they were stunned to find out that Bush was right. That evening we went through that bizarre sequence where the networks first called Al Gore the winner, before the polls even closed, then changed it to too close to call, then called George Bush the winner, only to have Al Gore decide to contest the results. The lesson here is that these campaigns have real data with real metrics and they KNOW how they are doing. George Bush knew he was doing a lot better in Florida than indicated by those exit polls. He was right and the main stream media ended up with egg all over their face.
When the Romney campaign was confronted with these polls, they just smiled and said: we are confident in our own data. It reminded me of George Bush.
TDM