posted by s10129107
10/12/2008 09:32:18 PM EST
Lately I've been feeling pretty good about Obama's lead in the polls, but being the cautious person that I am I decided to check how Gore and Kerry were polling around this time in their respective races. I wanted to see
1) How much the polls fluctuated in the final months and
2) How accurate the polls were from the final election data.
It turns out I'm not the only one who had that idea. In my search for poll numbers I stumbled over some conservative bloggers saying that Gore and Kerry had similar leads to Obama in this time period during their respective elections. They justified Obama's lead in the polls using tin-foil-hat theories (the "liberal" media is apparently fixing the polls [obviously Gallup and Rasmussen are part of the secret evil liberal organization] and republican operatives are posing covertly as democrats [i'm not making this up] in order to give Obama a false sense of confidence) and sketchy polls and many came to the conclusion that Mccain is going to win in a landlside. But what do REAL facts reveal.
Bush vs. Gore
People's Exhibit A : This is polling data from the beginning to the middle of October provided by MSNBC. They show Bush with a small to modestly sizable lead throughout the month of August. This data however is prejudiced as it omits all polls where Gore had a small to sizable lead. One such poll can be found here. The conservative blog, not surprisingly, failed to put the poll into the context of the presedential race.
Bush vs. Kerry
People's Exhibit B : This averaging of several major polls shows Kerry to have a very slight lead over Bush in the early days of October which slipped away towards the end of October. I would also like to remind you what the balance of power charts looked like during the Kerry-Bush Tussle.
Conclusion
In the Gore election most polls showed an extreemly tight race with a couple of anomalous polls showing slight to sizable leads for either candidate. The straying poll favoring Gore was taken after the Presidential debate and may have been affected by a debate bump to Gore.
In the 2004 election while there may have been a couple of anamolous polls, Kerry generally never had a big lead over Bush in October. End of the month polls in October appeared slightly spastic. Bush ended up winning with 51% of the vote to Kerry's 48%.
The polls in the two former elections seemed to hover around the end result, however there was some spastic action. If the spastic action is ignored, in my opinion the polls didn't do a bad job of predicting the end result.
The steady state polling in this election puts Obama up by 4-6 percentage points. This may not even be of any importance, though, as Obama is running a much smarter race than the two previous democrats. He is focusing on the electoral college race, not taking any moderately democratic or republican state for granted or as a lost cause respectively.
That being said there were significant fluctuations in the polls from previous elections that were not anomalous. I haven't, however, seen those kinds of fluctuations lately in this year's race. It would take a significant event for Mccain to turn these steady polls around and it would have to be some sort of crisis that benefited John Mccain. I cannot think of any such crisis, military, economic or otherwise that would help Mccain's chances as opposed to Obama's short of a character breaking revalation (maybe thats why Mccain is so worked up about Bill Ayers). Unless they find a serious character flaw or a horrible misdeed in Obama's history (something like a closet filled with child pornography or a gay sex scandel, you know, the kind of thing republican polititians get themselves involved with) I personally don't see a turnaround in the cards for Mccain.
Another issue underlined here is one of media bias. We all know the more conservative magazenes, news papers and bloggers don't always (don't usually) report things in a fair and balanced manner. Liberal outfits, as of late, also have a tendency to tilt the truth. It is dangerous to take the reports from MSNBC as gospel. Data must be checked and minds must be left open. The data provided by MSNBC regarding the Gore polls had several serious omissions that were designed to tilt the truth in their favor. I'm not saying you should watch Fox news, but we all know how silly conservative sheep sound when they proudly state that the media is liberal and cannot be trusted and only the most conservative news organizations are trustworthy. That street runs in two directions.
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