Article in the
New York Times:
Pollsters Faulted for Failure to Predict Edwards's Surge and for Subsequent News Coverage
Senator John Kerry may have beaten Senator John Edwards by nearly six percentage points in Wisconsin on Tuesday, but it was Mr. Edwards who picked up a tsunami of momentum in newspapers and on television, with pundits lauding him for beating their expectations.
Yesterday the source for those expectations, polls before the primary, were criticized for missing a late surge in popularity for Mr. Edwards, prompting a contentious debate within the news media over whether news outlets have been over-reliant on such polls. Some questioned whether Mr. Edwards received a bigger public relations bounce from his showing than he should have.
The debate broke into the open in the early morning, when a longtime polling executive, Warren Mitofsky, posted the following note on an Internet site for pollsters: "Yesterday exposed the biggest polling goofs in my memory." It gained particular notice because Mr. Mitofsky is one of the men in charge of the main service used by the networks and The Associated Press to survey voters when they leave the polls.
He went on to criticize the two main polls before the voting that helped lead many news outlets to expect that Mr. Kerry would beat Mr. Edwards by a much bigger margin than he did.
Calling the earlier polls flawed, Mr. Mitofsky said in an interview yesterday that if they had accurately picked up support for Mr. Edwards, the coverage would have played out differently -- perhaps giving him less of a bounce. That bounce helped Mr. Edwards dismiss questions about his viability and also helped him to raise $310,000 on the Internet by the late afternoon.
Conversely, Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster, said the coverage, based on the polls, set Mr. Kerry up for a fall.
This goes back to the point the other day - the polls are now being questioned considerably more than they were 2 weeks ago, and are being accused of setting up expectations which then become the story after the fact. First it was the inevitability of Kerry, now it's the late surging by Edwards.
So... will news media report all primary polls in the upcoming week with some sort of caveat about the Wisconsin results? Maybe poll reporting requires Picklerization.