We've always been at war with Eastasia.

Lane Core makes this Orwellian prediction:

Do you remember the second presidential term of William Jefferson Clinton? (America’s first “black” president.) Do you remember his polling numbers? (They sank pretty darn low.) More to the point — do you remember something else that happened to those polling numbers that had never happened before?

When Clinton’s approval numbers tanked and stayed tanked, the folks in mainstream media came to the rescue of their fellow Democrat by doing something they hadn’t done before: reporting two presidential approval numbers, the “job approval” rating vs. the “personal approval” rating.

They hadn’t done that for Ronald Wilson Reagan, a Republican. And two presidential approval numbers went back to being one presidential approval number starting on January 20, 2001, when George Walker Bush, another Republican, was inaugurated.

We haven’t heard two presidential approval ratings since.

That may be about to change, though, since approval numbers for President Barack Hussein Obama, another Democrat, sank to 37% in an AP-GfK survey this week.

If Obama’s approval numbers remain south of 40 for very long, look for another bifurcation into “job approval” and “personal approval” presidential ratings from the “Democratic protection racket” that is mainstream media.

 

Rejiggering polls.

John Podhoretz has a post about how the Salt Lake Tribune told its pollster to go check its findings in favor of a Republican candidate because there weren't enough Democrats in the sample. The pollster complied and - voila! - the Republican's lead evaporated.

Podhoretz observes:

To recap: A newspaper pays for a poll. It doesn’t like the look of the results. So it asks the pollster to reexamine them and alter them by changing his “weights.” He does so; he may agree with the call (as the Mason Dixon pollster says he does in the story) or he may be simply serving the interests of his paying client.

And it will do so based on the partisan split—the very controversy that is dismissed so cavalierly by media types.

We only know about this one because of the highly unusual circumstances of its revision. The question you have to ask yourself now is: How many times does this happen before a poll is published?

More Weird Polling.

The Washington Post's recent poll giving Obama 4 points on Romney makes Romney's RCP advantage disappear, but can the WaPo poll be taken as anything other than designed to make it appear that Obama has regained ground before the second debate. The Weekly Spectator reports:

The newly released Washington Post/ABC News poll of likely voters says that if the election were held today, Democrats would enjoy a 9-point advantage over Republicans in voter turnout (35 to 26 percent), and President Obama would beat Mitt Romney by 3 percentage points (49 to 46 percent). The good news for Romney is that, to be able to cut a 9-point disadvantage in voter turnout to just a 3-point deficit in votes, he must be doing awfully well with independents. The bad news for Obama is that it’s very hard to find corroborating evidence of this massive Democratic edge.

So, if we believe the pollsters, more people are identifying themselves as Democrat, even though they don't like Obama?

Does that make any sense?

Politics and Polling.

Yes, Virginia, politics does influence polling. For example, Gallup changed its polling methodology to favor Democrats in response to White House criticism.

More on Polling.

This is a follow up on the post explaining why there may be difference between what polling is telling us - namely, that there is a 13% edge in Democrat voters - and what registration data is telling us - namely, that Democrat registration has fallen below that of Republicans. The answer suggested by Michael Barone is that Republicans may be less willing to cooperate with pollsters.

This post indicates that this might be a very big problem indeed. Apparently, the last decade has seen a dramatic decline in the willingness of Americans to answer poll questions.

Only 9% of sampled households gave an answer to pollsters in 2012:

It has become increasingly difficult to contact potential respondents and to persuade them to participate. The percentage of households in a sample that are successfully interviewed – the response rate – has fallen dramatically. At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.

The general decline in response rates is evident across nearly all types of surveys, in the United States and abroad. At the same time, greater effort and expense are required to achieve even the diminished response rates of today. These challenges have led many to question whether surveys are still providing accurate and unbiased information.

What's the reason for this? More paranoia among Americans? A growing hostility by 50+% of Americans who think that polls are bogus? "Poll fatigue"?

Check out the anecdotes and this nifty chart of "distrust of the media correlated to ideology":

Look at the interesting "oikophobic" inversion in 2002, when conservative trust for the media rises at the same time as liberal trust in the media drops. What was happening then? The media was taking a more pro-American stance in the aftermath of 9/11.

What's positive for America is negative for the left.

About those polls.

The anomaly in the polls is that they are so skewed to Democrats during a time when Democrat registration is trailing Republican registration.

Assuming that pollsters are simply reporting what they are finding, then there would seem to be a 13% advantage among Democrats, which doesn't exist according to the information we have about registration.

I haven't been able to figure out how that is possible. If pollsters simply call up 1,000 people and those people report themselves to be 113% more Democrat than Republican, that seems to be a random sample, and it certainly wasn't "rigged" by the pollster.

That was the explanation offered to Hugh Hewitt in this interview:

HH: Joined now by Steven Shepard. Steven is the director of polling for the National Journal. Hello, Steven, welcome to the program, thanks for being on.

SS: Hi, how are you?

HH: Great. Your article today on polling, would you summarize it for the audience?

SS: Sure. I guess there has been a lot of talk in largely conservative circles lately, as you’re aware, and I know that you’ve addressed this on your show. And you talked to some of those same people I did for my story, basically that polls are sampling, or including too many Democrats in their samples. And I spoke to a few public and media pollsters about this, and they responded basically that they’re not, there is no model to which they’re setting the party ID breakdown in their polls. They’re just reporting the results of who they’re speaking with.

HH: Now they do weight their results based upon any number of different factors, correct?

SS: Correct. They weight based on gender, to make sure that they have sort of an accurate reflection of the overall population or the overall electorate with regards to the amount of men and women. They weight according to race, they, some pollsters will weight according to other factors like age, and mostly to age, but some towards also education or income, or something that is generally measured, and is relatively static, or changes over time. It’s something that can be measured.

HH: So why do they weight those factors, but not party affiliation?

SS: Because party affiliation is an attitude. This is their argument. It’s an attitude. This is exactly what the poll is designed to measure – how Americans are feeling about politics. And frequently, for instance, if you conduct a poll about, let’s say, the presidential race, and you ask the party identification at the end of the poll, it will frequently, especially for those sort of soft independents who could move one way or the other, they’ll just end up identifying with the party of the candidate that they chose earlier in the poll. So that tends to fluctuate a lot.

On the face, it seems reasonable to say that if you call up a thousand people and 700 says they are Democrat, then that tells you that the Democrats have a 70% registration rate.

But things are not the simple. We know this because every election, exit polls over-estimate the Democrat edge in voting. Michael Barone offers this insight:

It may be that we're seeing the phenomenon we've seen for years in exit polls, which have consistently skewed Democratic (and toward Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries). Part of that is interviewer error: Exit poll pioneer Warren Mitofsky found the biggest discrepancies between exit polls and actual results were in precincts where the interviewers were female graduate students.

But he also found that Democrats were simply more willing to fill out the exit poll. Which raises the question: Are we seeing the same thing in this month's polls?

Then, there is this interesting bit about cellphones from Hugh Hewitt's interview with Lee Mirengoff:

LM: Well, you have to understand also that there’s a difference between using live interviewers who call cell phones, and polls which use robocalls in terms of their scientific basis and their dependability.

HH: I understand that, and we…

LM: Let me finish the point, please. If you do not use cell phones in your surveys, as a lot of the surveys don’t, you’re missing what is most of the Obama margin, because right now, about 30% of the households, and the likely voters in each of these states, are cell phone only. And in fact, I could give you the numbers, but you don’t want to get bored by the statistics. The truth is that most of the Obama margin is based on the cell phone, which are obviously younger people and people who are minorities. If you don’t have cell phones in the sample, you’re going to find a one or two point difference in the race. We do also among our land line only respondents.

Hewitt has done the best job of explaining these nuances in this article.

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.

The ridiculous lengths the media will go to in order to keep Obama ahead in the polls.

So, a few days after the mighty Democrat convention, the Washington Post's polling shows that Romney and Obama are in a statistical tie...

...so long as in the general election the electoratecontains only 23% Republican voters!

This is ridiculous. The Republican turn-out will be in the mid-30% range at least.

The only thing that the liberal media cares about getting right are the headlines.

This is one way to stay even in the polls...

...Justice Dept. Gallup lawsuit came after Axelrod criticized pollsters:

Internal emails between senior officials at The Gallup Organization, obtained by The Daily Caller, show senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod attempting to subtly intimidate the respected polling firm when its numbers were unfavorable to the president.

After Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, Obama’s Department of Justice hit it with an unrelated lawsuit that appears damning on its face.

TheDC is withholding the identities of the Gallup officials to protect them from potential retaliation from Obama’s campaign and his administration. (SEE ALSO: DOJ still hasn’t served Gallup with lawsuit)

In April, Axelrod tweeted that a poll showing Mitt Romney with a 48-43 percent lead over Obama was “saddled with some methodological problems,” directing his Twitter followers to read a National Journal story criticizing Gallup polls showing a Romney lead.

It's the Chicago Way.

From "The water is wet and other surprising news" file...

...polls are inordinately skewed in favor of Democrat positions.

Usual B.S. explanations are advanced.

Polling was wrong - way wrong - on North Carolina marriage amendment.

Are people lying to pollsters because they know what the "right" answer is?

Also, the North Carolina vote indicates why Obama is dithering between his constituencies.

According to Maggie Gallagher:

Even Public Policy Polling (a Democratic firm), which showed marriage amendment passing by 16 points right before the election, were shocked by the massive victory for the North Carolina marriage amendment, admitting via tweet: “Hate to say it, but I don’t believe polls showing support for gay marriage nationally. Any times there is a vote it doesn’t back it up.”

Actual margin of victory: 22 points, in a swing state which backed Obama in 2008.

This is from Public Policy Polling from May 1, 2012:

PPP's newest poll on the North Carolina marriage amendment shows little movement from a week ago. 55% plan to vote yes next week, while 41% are opposed.

And from McClatchy:

A final poll of likely North Carolina voters conducted over the weekend continues to give a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions an easy margin of victory in Tuesday’s election while the Democratic contest for governor is tightening.

The referendum holds a 16-point advantage, 55 percent in favor and 39 percent against, according to the Public Policy Polling survey, a left-leaning Raleigh-based firm. The numbers shifted little in the final week as big-names on either side of the debate – Rev. Billy Graham for and former President Bill Clinton against – made final pleas to persuade voters.

The actual result was that 61% of the voters voted for the amendment, which refused to recognize both homosexual marriage and civil unions:

North Carolina voters Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution which limits marriage to traditional one man-one woman marriages.

With all of the state's 100 counties reporting, the amendment won in a landslide, with 61 percent of the vote.

Actually, the McClatchy entry suggests that all of the "undecideds" broke in favor of the amendment, which suggests that they weren't really undecided and chose to claim to be undecided for some reason.

Perhaps to avoid being called an ignorant redneck bigot?