Another Network Undercuts the Results of its Own Post-Debate Presidential Poll - This Time, MSNBC about Barack Obama
Nov 2, 2007
The networks continue to denigrate the results of their own
post-debate polls-
Last night, Chris Matthews mentioned on MSNBC's Hardball that Barack Obama won the
poll that MSNBC conducted after the Democratic Presidential debate
on Tuesday-
To which Chuck Todd, MSNBC's "official" pollster replied - that
poll was done with cell phones, via which Obama's supporters could
keep pounding the call keys...
To which Matthews responded - like in the 1936 Literary Digest poll...
To which I would respond:
No, Chris, not like that 1936 poll at all, which was supposed to be
a poll of a randomly selected part of the voting population, but
was skewed or biased because it was conducted from lists of
automobile owners and people who had telephones in their homes, and
only very rich people had those luxuries in those days, so the
Literary Digest poll
wrongly showed the Democrat FDR losing...
Which has nothing in common with MSNBC's post-election poll -
except that it, too, was conducted by phone. But it was never
designed as a randomly conducted poll.
What Chris should have said to Chuck Todd was: wrong, callers
can't cast votes more than once on the same phone... Or, if
by some bizarre chance they could, then simply install a program on
your vote-reception software which would make it impossible for
anyone to cast a vote more than once on the same cell phone.
Very easy, really - and certainly preferable to encouraging viewers
to vote in your poll, and the undercutting the results.
Well, at least Ron Paul now has company - now Obama's supporters,
like Ron Paul's, are discounted because they participate in a poll
that a network conducts, and then expresses no confidence in
because they don't like the results.
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My 50-minute lecture about
network after-debate polls and the media's misreporting of Ron
Paul, delivered to my class at Fordham University