@okie,
okie wrote:
This happened before, no surprise, nimh. Polls had Bush losing twice before, ahead of the election, because pollsters are biased, plain and simple, and most of them are democrats.
Interesting argument, if it weren't for the fact that polls did
not actually have Bush losing twice before. Though individual poll results will have spanned a wide range of numbers, the bulk of polls in the last few weeks before the elections had Bush very much in the lead both times. As I happened, conveniently, to have rather exhaustively documented right here on a2k in 2004.
Check, for example, the graph from RealClearPolitics, a conservative site,
I posted back then, showing the average across the ongoing polls in the Kerry vs Bush race. Bush led all the way from the beginning of September onward, throughout the last two months of the race.
Even after the race tightened considerably in the last couple of weeks and Kerry came from far behind to very close up to Bush, the opinion polls conducted at the very eve of the elections favoured Bush.
Check this comprehensive list I posted at the time: 9 pollsters, in their very last poll or official projection, signalled a Bush win, 5 a Kerry win, and 3 a tie. And again, that was
after the polls had shown Kerry to at least be catching up, a week or two weeks before almost all of them had Bush in the lead.
As for the 2000 race, Gore was far behind in the polls back then; the lead he ended up having in the popular vote in the actual elections surprised everyone. I posted an article on Observationalism about this just the other day, with
graphs and everything. The Gallup tracking poll had Bush in the lead over Gore almost every day from early October onward. A week before the 2000 elections, Gore was down some 3-5 points. With the exception of one single day, Gore was steadily behind by 2-7 points throughout the last two weeks of polling.
Same in the other tracking polls. The TIPP/IBD/CSM poll had Bush ahead throughout the last four weeks of the campaign. The daily ABC poll had Bush ahead throughout the last month of the campaign, with the exception of two days in which Gore and Bush were tied.
You know, I'm just, I dunno. Nonplussed is the word, I guess. At how stubbornly you folks just keep asserting things as fact that are just flat-out not true, and that a simple check would have confirmed to be false. I mean, you dont need to have all the graphs and data at hand that I brought just now, not everyone needs to be a hopeless geek. But finding out that Bush wasnt actually behind in the polls in either election, at least not in the last month of the campaign, really isnt hard. Sure there must have been this or that poll that had Kerry or Gore ahead for the day, but the consensus among pollsters at the time had Bush ahead throughout the last weeks of the campaign both times, and this is just verifiable.
And you know, if you had just said, I dont believe in polling anyway, thats fine. But if you say "Polls had Bush losing twice before, ahead of the election," and then build this whole conclusion about how that just shows that pollsters are biased Democrats who are out to make the Democratic candidate look like he's ahead -- when the whole assertion that the polls had Bush losing both times is just factually untrue and easily checkable at that ... Well, I dont get it.
I do agree that the election will be fairly close, though.
...but yeah, I think it's going to be fairly close, especially in terms of the popular vote. Couple of percentage points, really.
