Recent polling as reported by liberal news outlets has engendered many analysis in conservative journals decrying the bias in the reporting with some suggesting guileful intent on the part of the pollsters if not the sponsors. The sponsors are often the liberal news outlets that control the reporting and information necessary to evaluate the reliability of the poll.
Some conservative analysts have looked at what information is available regarding individual polls and compared them to polls from more reliable organizations and as regards best practices and offering other insights. Here at Veritas we published a recent article with related intent.
Pajama Media has several writers that have dissected the black art for our benefit. Beyond the many that have pointed out the factors that make polls indicating Obama is substantially ahead unreliable, a post therein today by “Zombie” makes the point that assumptions about the affect of biased polls are also unreliable. Zombie’s lists five assumptions people make relating to their understanding of “mass psychology” and indicates why these presumptions that lead unscrupulous people to conduct biased polls may backfire.
ASSUMPTION #1
• When a person sees that his team is in second place, he gives up and stops fighting.
ASSUMPTION #2
• People’s desire to be part of the “in crowd” is much stronger than any political philosophy they may have.
ASSUMPTION #3
• The liberal media can communicate directly to their conservative opponents with reverse dog whistles, while winking to Obama voters that they should ignore the lies.
ASSUMPTION #4
• Low-information undecided voters in swing states pay attention to the news, current events and polls.
ASSUMPTION #5
• Polling companies need to be accurate in order to gain a reputation for reliability, so they have no motivation to lie.
Zombie calls into question each of these assumptions (for reasons with which we heartily agree) and provides compelling down-to-earth practical political analysis of each one, concluding:
Five assumptions. Never questioned. All or most of them need to be true for poll-skewing to be effective. And yet under closer inspection none of them are proven to be true. On the other hand, there’s no solid evidence that they’re false, either; it’s all a guessing game of untested hypotheses. From my vantage point, which in the absence of any solid data is as valid as anyone else’s, many of the assumptions are not only false but they are inverted: The exact opposite assumption is more likely to be true.
Campaign strategists and their poll-skewing accomplices may be shooting themselves in the foot every single day by jumping to unproven conclusions about mass psychology. For all they know, every action they take backfires, and helps the opposition.
But they can’t be bothered by doubts. Merrily they skew and skew, convinced of their cunning.
The full article is a must read and is available here. But the most chilling suggestion as to why we are seeing purposely skewed polls is to plant “the evidence that you were in the lead so that when voter fraud propels you to otherwise undeserved victory, it looks believable?” Skewed polls are useful to organized voter fraud activities, in other words the pre-cover-up. The later words are our analysis and not necessarily Zombie’s. Read the article . . . and check out the comment section as well.
