Stupid
December 20, 2007
6:43 AM CST
From NRO:
And yet in Iowa, Huckabee’s taking off — 31 percent in the Quad City Times poll, 36 percent in the Hotline/FD poll, 39-percent in Rasmussen, and 30 percent in the Strategic Vision poll. In all of those polls, his closest competitor Mitt Romney is stuck in the mid-20s.
In South Carolina, Huckabee has jumped, but finds himself in a much tighter race — up six in Insider Advantage, up 7 in Rasmussen, up 3 in Mason-Dixon, up 11 in Survey USA, up 7 in CNN. He tops out at 30-percent in Survey USA’s poll, and it’s getting 20 to 25 percent of that field in the other polls. And the most recent Rasmussen poll released this week puts him tied with Romney.
The cartoonist Berkeley Breathed once had something similar appear in one of his strips, spoken by reporter Milo, who then collapsed, overcome by the depth of his political analysis.
I’ve created surveys, and studied the data from more polls than I can count non-stop in a day, and let me tell you, all this statistical nit-picking and hair-splitting (by people who couldn’t recognize a regression analysis if it bit them in the ass) is more hokum than can be found in the average speech by Ron Paul.
I also know how wonderfully-inaccurate polls can be when it’s a well-known fact that most respondents lie to pollsters, especially issue-driven and biased pollsters (as most political ones are).
So nowadays, when I see or hear a report which begins, “Latest polls indicate...”, I normally turn my attention elsewhere.
But in this case I didn’t. What the article pointed out, far too late in the piece, is that Iowa Republicans are a bunch of morons easily won over by a man who wears his religion on his sleeve: Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Alan Keyes all did far better in Iowa than expected, and had results far closer to, and in some cases even beat the front-runners.
Once Iowa was over, however, these guys disappeared faster than a tray of drinks at a Kennedy reunion at Martha’s Vineyard.
I’ve said before, Iowa is a meaningless state (in so many ways), and to allow this misbegotten entity to dictate the tone of the U.S. Presidential election is just silly. (I’m not even going to talk about how ridiculous the Iowa “caucus” system is [scroll down], because that alone should be grounds for dumping the entire state into the Marianas Trench.)
Anyway, if journalists want to be taken seriously, they should hold off on the point-by-point commentary of poll results. We Americans are famously entranced by statistics (baseball fetishists especially), but this is ridiculous.
What the polls do is allow journalists to be lazy, and simply report on the survey results instead of doing, you know, actual journalism, whereby candidates’ positions can be dissected and debated.
Perish the thought.
