Polls. Why are we behind still.. Sad..

[Tropez]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls.html

Boo! Cmmon cell phone users and new registered voters. Bring it home for us!

[GR]

1. Read MyDD.com To See Why That's BS...

fyi

[rocktivity]

6. According to MyDD.com

...fifteen polling firms have conducted national polls entirely since the end of the last debate, and thirteen of them show Bush under 50. For an incumbent, that is very dangerous. It struck me as an intentional attempt to depress Democratic turnout on Election Day by lying and/or fishing for polls that provide a dramatic narrative.
In other words, these polls are being used as weapons of mass demoralization.

link

[klook]

9. Bingo.

That's the turd in the koolaid bowl.

[shivaji]

22. But Clinton was never over 50% and won with 44% of vote, but

Perot took away a lot of votes.

[WI_DEM]

2. I see the AP/IPOS has Kerry up by 3

I discount Fox. ABC tracking with Bush up six is just an outliar. Most polls have it a tie or statistically a deadheat 1-2 points for Bush.

[lancdem]

13. Quinnipiac out today also has it Kerry 49, Bush 46

[fujiyama]

15. They also have a PA poll

showing Kerry up by 5. I'm feeling pretty confident about PA and MI...I'm worried mostly bout IA, WI, and NM.

[NJCher]

3. read Paul Krugman

You need to read Paul Krugman's latest column, too.

Cher

[still_one]

4. you just called what will bring it home to us plus

the 18-24 year old group

I also believe when women get into that voting booth they will go with Kerry especially because of the Supreme Court

[kostya]

5. RealClear leans very far right, ignore it.

Just read their commentary and you'll see where they are coming from. - K

[klook]

7. We are ahead, but need every vote to bring in a Kerry-Edwards win.

What pollster John Zogby said on Air America Radio this morning indicates that Kerry/Edwards are actually ahead of */GFY:

• His polling of a few hundred "likely voters" shows */GFY ahead by a point or two. Since he says his polling data has an error rate of around 2 percent, this makes it a statistical dead heat.
  
• "Undecided" voters almost always swing toward the challenger, and these represent a full five percent of "likely voters."
  
• Zogby assumes that only "likely voters" matter (those who've voted in a recent election). So registered voters who haven't voted recently are off his radar. This includes newly registered voters, of whom there are scads, so I hear, and more than half of them are Democrats.
  

Even if you believe the polls (and I think they're all highly suspect, including Zogby), it's still looking very close but slightly favorable for Kerry-Edwards.

[shivaji]

23. I can relax a little now....thanks for the re-assurance

[okieinpain]

8. a couple of days ago the split was 3.5%. I always expect the

repug to do better in polls, because I think polls favor well to do middle class folks. and not the lower income people. I've yet to hear any of my friends or co-workers tell me they have been polled.

[DemocracyInaction]

10. I would expect Bush to be slightly ahead

This is nationwide and he has some tremendous support in the south. The race, itself, is stuck in the dead middle. And may I point out at my peril that Bush never gets above 50% and NEITHER does Kerry. No majority of the people want either one!! It's going to be where the votes fall in which states. In the battlegrounds, Kerry is doing quite good but tight. Add all this red state pro-Bush with around half the blue contested states pro-Bush and Bush will look stronger. It's the EV's that are going to determine this and that's not reflected in broad national polls.

[michigandem2]

11. what is with DU???

I dont' really expect the polls to reflect Kerry opening a huge lead by now till election day...and the trend is clearly headed to him...

we are 11 days out of a very long election campaign BUSH is hurting..pay attention to the incumbent...undecideds might not make up their freaking minds till the 31st or even worse ON election day..so please no more doom and gloom lets remain positive..we have this aura of defeat because of what happened in 2000 but these yahoos have no idea what is going to hit them...

CHEER UP DAMMIT

[rjbny62]

12. listen, the polls have a history of trending repub

just take a look at these poll results from late in the 2000 race and remind yourself that Gore won the popular vote

2000 "LIKELY VOTER" polls:

Gallup Oct 24 Gore 39 AWOL 52

Newsweek Oct 25 Gore 41 AWOL 39

Pew Oct 24 Gore 43 AWOL 47

NBC Nov 2 Gore 44 AWOL 47

TIME Oct 25 Gore 43 AWOL 49

Washington PostOct 15 Gore 43 AWOL 48

ABC News Nov 2 Gore 45 AWOL 49

[Ernesto]

20. Welcome to DU rjbny62

And an excellent post! This is exactly what I've been telling people who are scared about the election! We are in wayyyyyy better shape this time around!
4 years ago, I was a nervous wreck. Today, I feel GREAT!

[Starlight]

25. Exactly! We went through this same thing in 2000.

It wasn't true then & it isn't true now. IMO, it they're saying it's a dead heat then Kerry must be way ahead! :)

Another thing: I was reading an article on polls that said, even with repeated attempts to call people, they end up with less than 30% response rate. The other 70% either never answer their phone or refuse to participate.

I suspect Bush supporters are more likely to answer & agree to talk with the caller based, strangely enough, on some guys I work with who used to telemarket penny stocks. They said they LOVED rural southerners (think red states) because they were such easy customers: willing to talk to strangers & easy to convince to buy. NYers, OTOH, either didn't answer at all or swore & hung up on the caller. :P

[rjbny62]

14. evidence of problems polling democrats

as you can see below, there seems to be a problem with underpolling dems. Gallup was consistently showing Gore well below his actual final % in the last presidential election. If Kerry is in the mid to high forties no one should be sad.

This is what Gallup told us in 2000:
ALL LV

Oct17

Bush 48
Gore 42

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct18

Bush 49
Gore 39

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct19

Bush 50
Gore 40

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct20

Bush 51
Gore 40

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct21

Bush 50
Gore 41

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct22

Bush 46
Gore 44

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct23

Bush 45
Gore 46

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct 24

Bush 48
Gore 43

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct25

Bush 49
Gore 42

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct26

Bush 52
Gore 39

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct27

Bush 49
Gore 42

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct28

Bush 49
Gore 42

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct30

Bush 47
Gore 44

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Oct31

Bush 48
Gore 43

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Nov1

Bush 47
Gore 43

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Nov2

Bush 48
Gore 42

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Nov3

Bush 47
Gore 43

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Nov4

Bush 48
Gore 43

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Nov5

Bush 47
Gore 45

Note: Gore went on to win the popular vote.

Nov6 (last poll before the election)

Bush 48
Gore 46

[Slit Skirt]

16. here's some good news!

Most College Students Favor Kerry -Harvard Poll

Thu Oct 21, 4:24 PM ET Politics - Reuters


By Svea Herbst-Bayliss

BOSTON (Reuters) - The majority of U.S. college students favor Democratic challenger John Kerry (news - web sites) over President Bush (news - web sites), according to a Harvard University poll released on Thursday that sees a dramatic rise in campus voter turnout.


Justweeks before the Nov. 2 election, researchers at Harvard's Institute of Politics found that 52 percent of all students want the Massachusetts senator elected president, 39 percent support Bush, and 8 percent are undecided.


In 14 hotly contested swing states, the poll shows Kerry leading Bush by 17 points among students.

<snip>
HEAVY CAMPUS TURNOUT SEEN
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041021/pl_nm/campaign_youth_dc_3

ALSO

Voting and Counting
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 22, 2004

the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.

Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.

This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break against the incumbent - not always, but we're talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger zone.

Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html?pagewanted=print&position=

[klook]

17. Gallup's skewed sample

Krugman:
"Gallup's sample of supposedly likely voters contains a much smaller proportion of both minority and young voters than the actual proportions of these voters in the 2000 election."

And many more minority and young voters are going to vote this time, so that's great for the good guys.

[Steelangel]

18. polls are useless and GOP-biased <eom>

[rjbny62]

21. although

right track/wrong track and favorability numbers can be good leading indicators of where things are heading. * has to be worried about these.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

19. we are doing fine

the horse race is a dead heat

and we are doing fine in the battleground states...


I understand your need for certainty but we are a polarized nation....

Peace

Brian

[ClassWarrior]

24. Polls. What are they good for?

ABSOLUTELY NUTHIN.

There's only one poll that matters. The one that the sweet little old blue-haired lady will be taking over at the local elementary school on Nov. 2.

24.

[Snivi Yllom]

26. dont believe the hype nt

[Nicholas_J]

27. As Kerry and others frequently say it is bad to peak early.

The time to start your upswing and peak is the weekend before the election, as this is the time when the last of the undecided voters make their final decisions. Zogby and other independent pollsters regularly state that the last weekend is when the election is finally made. THe polls have been wavering back and forth between Bush, and in fact, when independent polls like Ipsos Cook come out showing Kerry with a lead, polls that are well known to be oversampling Republicans and Bush himself come out and do polls to deny the results of the earlier polls. The real fact about those polls like Gallop and Faux and even SUSA and Rasmussen is that they show such a wide variance that the only way they could be accurate is if every other day democrats were flip flopping in their suppport for the democratic candidate. As Zogby noted people who have made up their mind last week to support the democrat do not suddenly change their party affiliation the next week to support a Republican. Given the fact that the percentages of undecided voters in polls like these remains relatively the same,the only explaniation for their results is that Democrats are for Bush one week and for Kerry the next. Zogby points out that this is not consistant with human or voter behavior. Any polls that seem to show a wide variance with other polls or themselves are likely to be fixed given those facts about behavior.

For a Gallop poll to sho Kerry a point ahead one week, and then Bush 8 points the next is a string indication of something untoward about the polls rather than the voters.

[Teaser]

28. If I see one more whiny post...

I'm going to have to unleash my withering contempt on you people.

So many whiners.