I wanted to take a quick look back at how the polls were shaping up for George W. Bush back in 2004 against John Kerry. The graphics below come from a site that I frequently look to guage the direction of the polls. They gather several different polling organizations (Rasmuusem, Zogby, CNN, Gallup, etc.) and average things out to come up with an electoral projection.
I have chosen to display the map the showed Kerry with one if his biggest electoral leads during the 6 weeks running up to the election. This map shows Kerry getting 289 electoral votes in winning the election. In the process, it shows him taking Florida, Ohio, Iowa and a tossup in New Mexico. Kerry lost all of these states and the election. In all, at least 10 states' final results were significantly better for George W. Bush than these polls showed. Only New Hampshire, which was listed as a toss-up, went to Kerry.
Now...look at the date of this poll average - November 1, 2004 - the DAY BEFORE THE ELECTION. Less than 24 hours before 120 million Americans went out to vote, the polling organizations had called it wrong!
This is how it ended up:
And remember, even on election day - their exit polls were way off AGAIN!
Don't let anyone tell you what to think - just do what you need to do.
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4 comments:
Well, the polls were compared to the election results. You are comparing two measures, so there are three possibilities. The polls were wrong, the election results were wrong or they were both wrong. We have no evidence that the polls were wrong (that's not to say they weren't wrong...absence of evidence and all that) We do have evidence that the election results were...uh...not the best.
You're kidding, right? Isn't it amazing that many cases of Demcorat fraud go under-reported in the media and yet, surprisingly, there always seems to be some completely unsupported claim of voter intimidation or disenfranchisement precisely in the one state that would swing the election for the Democrat (Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004). I guess this year it will be Virginia or Colorado...
The claims were certainly not unsupported, but were rather well documented. From a sociological perspective it doesn't really matter. The election results in Florida were, for all statistical purposes, a tie in 2000, which means the issue should have gone to the House of Representatives as per the Constitution, not the US Supreme Court. As for Ohio, when the owner of the company that produces the voting machines states for the record that his goal is to get Bush re-elected there's a conflict of interest there that both parties should be talking about. Your claim that this stuff is unsupported is bogus.
Having someone say that something happened is not "supporting" an argument - just making one.
Bring me evidence or be relegated to the conspiracy bin :)
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