Polling

Tarnished Silver? The New York Times's young star pollster Nate Silver got some guff last week for dismissing Mitt Romney's large leads in the Gallup tracking poll. In an October 18 post on his FiveThirtyEight blog at nytimes.com, "Gallup vs. the World" (it also appeared, heavily edited, in print) Silver claimed the Gallup poll was overrated and "its results turn out badly" when it's an…

On Tuesday, liberal stalwart NPR hyped a BBC World Service poll that found that "if the world picked U.S. president, election would be a blowout" for President Obama. Writer Eyder Peralta's item, which was the number-one most-viewed on its website, spotlighted that the poll "taken in 21 countries...found for the most part, foreign countries preferred Obama. The only exception was Pakistan where…

After a USA Today/Gallup poll showed women in swing states thought abortion the top election issue, CNN hyped the news and cast a wary eye toward "controversial" Republican positions as the possible catalysts. Five days later, however, Gallup reported that, nationally, abortion is near the bottom of importance among voters. CNN hosts Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper led their October 18…

NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham appeared on the Fox Business Channel's Varney & Co. earlier this morning to review how the liberal media spun last night's debate, and what to expect over the next two weeks. Host Stuart Varney suggested media bias could not dislodge the pro-Romney trend now evident in the polls, but Graham offered a warning: "We could see some of the most aggressive…

You don't know whether to laugh or cry upon reading the Sunday night shots campaign Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico took at Mitt Romney and his campaign. Maybe these guys really believe that the Romney campaign is the one which still desperately needs a "last chance to move the needle in any significant way in the swing states that will decide the election," and that "Obama is…

The New York Times' s acclaimed poll-meister Nate Silver has a reputation for statistical expertise, but he's getting some guff for dismissing Mitt Romney's recent large leads in the Gallup tracking poll. Silver's Thursday evening post on his FiveThirtyEight blog at nytimes.com, "Gallup vs. the World" claimed that Gallup's "results are deeply inconsistent with the results that other polling…

On Friday's CBS This Morning, John Dickerson was all too eager to pour cold water on the latest Gallup daily tracking poll that has Mitt Romney with a seven-point lead over President Obama: "There is a lot of debate about that...poll - whether it lags behind where the race really is....there's also other criticisms about...the way it looks at likely voters...it's a bit of an outlier from some…

Jake Sherman at the Politico is suffering from the same detachment from reality I found his colleague Anna Palmer in this morning (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). Palmer's piece asserted that an election win by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney would herald the return of l-l-l-lobbyists, who have supposedly (not actually) been a rare presence in the pristine and pure Obama administration…

On Monday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd analyzed the state of the presidential race following a series of new national polls showing a slight Romney lead: "Well, look, the first debate really did sort of shift things....the numbers I've seen, and in talking to both campaigns, something shifted fundamentally." However, only four days earlier, on Thursday's Today, Todd argued the…

On October 3, as Kyle Brennan's at NewsBusters noted the next day, NBC News political director Chuck Tood, appearing on CNBC, characterized presidential polls generated by Scott Rasmussen's polling group as "slop." The specific quote: "We spend a lot more money polling than Scott Rasmussen does. We spend a lot more money on quality control....I hate the idea that [NBC] polling, which is…

While the ABC and CBS morning shows on Thursday focused on a tightening presidential race following Mitt Romney's winning performance in the first debate, on NBC's Today, political director Chuck Todd used the network's new swing state polling to argue that the debate was "not as helpful to Romney as he might have hoped." Prompting co-host Savannah Guthrie conclude: "Alright, so the debate had…

While a guest on the Fox News Channel's "America Live" program on Tuesday, Scott Rasmussen dismissed a comment made last week by NBC's very liberal political director Chuck Todd who called the pollster's work "slop." Even though Rasmussen said he doesn't know Todd or follow his work and is happy to have the competition, host Megyn Kelly called the NBC correspondent's remark "mean" as she came…

Every election cycle, the American people are inundated with polls.  Polls with blacks, white, Hispanics, women, Jews, Catholics, young people, and the Asians are disseminated ad nauseam ­– despite most of them being flawed or so skewed concerning the sample spread that it’s not worth commenting on in any analysis.  When Romney hit a slump towards the end of September, which led to his dip in…

This presidential election, the reliability and fairness of pollsters has become a hot topic with both conservatives and liberals casting doubt on the accuracy of various polling firms. But what if the real problem with polling is more attributable to the people who respond to surveys than the polling companies themselves? Thanks to a study examining the accuracy of polling, we now know that…