There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. (Mark Twain)
Here are a few excepts from a column by Ann Coulter about presidential elections, statistics, and particularly, polls. She did a study of polls and statistics going back to every election since 1976. Cited from the McCarville Report Online.
-
Reviewing the polls printed in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the last month of every presidential election since 1976, I found the polls were never wrong in a friendly way to Republicans. When the polls were wrong, which was often, they overestimated support for the Democrat, usually by about 6 to 10 points.
-
In 1976, Jimmy Carter narrowly beat Gerald Ford 50.1 percent to 48 percent. And yet, on Sept. 1, Carter led Ford by 15 points. Just weeks before the election, on Oct. 16, 1976, Carter led Ford in the Gallup Poll by 6 percentage points – down from his 33-point Gallup Poll lead in August.
-
Reading newspaper coverage of presidential elections in 1980 and 1984, I found myself paralyzed by the fear that Reagan was going to lose.
-
In 1980, Ronald Reagan beat Carter by nearly 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent. In a Gallup Poll released days before the election on Oct. 27, it was Carter who led Reagan 45 percent to 42 percent.
-
In 1984, Reagan walloped Walter Mondale 58.8 percent to 40 percent, – the largest electoral landslide in U.S. history. But on Oct. 15, The New York Daily News published a poll showing Mondale with only a 4-point deficit to Reagan, 45 percent to 41 percent. A Harris Poll about the same time showed Reagan with only a 9-point lead. The Oct. 19 New York Times/CBS News Poll had Mr. Reagan ahead of Mondale by 13 points. All these polls underestimated Reagan’s actual margin of victory by 6 to 15 points.
-
So in 1992, the polls had Clinton 12 to 15 points ahead, but he won by only 5.3 points. In 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole 49 percent to 40 percent. And yet on Oct. 22, 1996, The New York Times/CBS News Poll showed Clinton leading by a massive 22 points, 55 percent to 33 percent.
-
In 2000, which I seem to recall as being fairly close, the October polls accurately described the election as a virtual tie, with either Bush or John Kerry 1 or 2 points ahead in various polls. But in one of the latest polls to give either candidate a clear advantage, The New York Times/CBS News Poll on Oct. 3, 2000, showed Gore winning by 45 percent to 39 percent.
The point of all this? Draw your own conclusions, but in general, polls are among the most imprecise things around, far from reliable. That whole business about “+ or - 3% points” of accuracy is hogwash. In the history of the statistics just cited, the polls could be off by as many as 17 percentage points!!!
Public opinion polls, IMHO, are one of the most pernicious and manipulative things ever invented, particularly when dealing with highly subjective matters concerning politics, culture, values, etc. It’s one thing to take a poll and ask something like: Did you buy vacuum cleaner brand X? Did it break down within the first year? Those are yes/no questions, fairly objective. Those kinds of polls are quite useful.
But polls asking questions about politics and how people are going to vote and so forth, can be, and ARE, used to sway the outcome of the election. How else can someone explain why polls from certain organizations just seem to coincidentally always be “wrong” in a certain direction? As Coulter said, why is it that polls from the New York Times always seem to be wrong in favor of the liberal and/or Democratic candidates?
Clearly the “vast left-wing conspiracy” in America exists. It is a movement that wants to turn America into yet another pansy, Euro-socialist empire like France or Sweden, with handouts for all, and government running EVERYTHING. And the public opinion polls, whose questions can be subtly tweaked and whose results can be so easily predetermined, are their favorite tool.
Just let the communist news network select the president.