I put Middle Earth Journal in hiatus in May of 2008 and moved to Newshoggers.
I temporarily reopened Middle Earth Journal when Newshoggers shut it's doors but I was invited to Participate at The Moderate Voice so Middle Earth Journal is once again in hiatus.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Galluping to a fixed election

The Gallup polls have been showing George Bush with a double digit lead since the Republican Convention. Many of us thought that this defied logic and Steve Soto at The Left Coaster has been investigating for almost 2 weeks. Steve determined that Gallup was weighting the polls to the Republicans favor, see the above linked post for details.
Move On ran an ad in the NYT today questioning Gallup's polling methods. There are a number of reasons why they might do this from trying to discourage Democrats ( plausible), to creating an atmosphere where no one will be surprised when Bush wins as the result of election irregularities, (a bit on the tinfoil hat side). So why would Gallup want to sway the election:
George Gallup Jr., son of the poll's
founder, was the longtime head of the
company and now directs its non-profit
research center.Why hasn't he pushed
for an update of the company's likely
voter modeling, which his own father
pioneered in the 1950s?
Gallup, who is a devout evangelical
Christian, has been quoted as calling
his polling a kind of ministry. And a
few months ago, he said the most
profound purpose of polls is to see how
people are responding to God.

Well everyone knows that Democrats and independents don't listen to "God" so I guess it makes sense to mostly poll Republicans. If this is the way Gallup wants to do their polls that's fine, the problem is CNN and other network news outlets treat them as fact.

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