On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 9:57 PM, Greg Diener <[email protected]> wrote:
> During the election the three things I kept a watchful eye on were Nate > Silver's blog, Sam Wang's calculation at Princeton and the Rand > Presidential Poll. (SNIP) And it wasn't just the right wingers that were > wrong, the media tried their best to make the presidential election a > "horserace". Especially after the first debate, where they oversold how > "great" Romney "performed" in the first debate when I contend it was a > perfect storm of (SNIP) it's hard to believe that despite all of this > evidence, Gallup couldn't identify the problems in their polling which was > obvious to anyone who was paying attention to the campaign like me. Well > unless your name is either Karl Rove or Dick Morris. > I don't disagree with any of this, but I think it is important to underline again that for the most part the problem with the Gallup poll was not the crass partisanship of Rove or Morris, or even the crass marketing of CNN and MSNBC. Gallup was committed to a particular polling model which rested heavily on what they viewed as a proprietary likely voter screening algorithm. This model is conservative not in the partisan sense, but in the sense that it assumes the future will be like the past. If the partisan and ethnic and age turnout had been similar to 2004 and before, then CNN would have been right. The problem with their model was that it was not dynamic - it did not account for how the composition of likely voters was changing, and was likely to continue to change given underlying national demographics. The lowbrow cable news competition affected this by preventing knowledgeable voices like the ones you mention for the most part off the air, and not providing the reasonable context for challenging the Gallup-based consensus for their own competitive (as opposed to accurate news reporting) reasons. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
