On Morning Joe on MSNBC today, both Chuck Todd and Mike Murphy were strongly in agreement with each other about how lousy the poll results are in this election cycle and warned repeatedly against paying attention to them (MSNBC video). Each, in his own way, strongly supported many of the contentions of Arianna Huffington in her post today (Obama's Trip Bounce).
This is my first diary. I'm a member of the mythical over-50, white-female cohort that McCain and Obama are desperate to woo. I was originally a John Edwards supporter and have supported Obama since Edwards dropped out.
Please read on.
Since Obama came back from Europe, the punditocracy have frequently cited the McCain bump on the recent Gallup poll of likely voters as a major coup (Gains for McCain). But Todd and Murphy insist that polls of "likely voters" are worthless because they are done in a way that, at best, doesn't work well, and in a year like this, won't work at all, for several important reasons:
(1) Millions of Obama supporters will be voting for the first time this year, and because they are new to voting, they aren't on the radar of pollsters. Because a large percentage of Obama supporters are strongly underpolled, Obama could be much farther ahead of McCain than the polls show.
(2) People, in general, don't want to talk to pollsters--they are sick of being called. As a result, the raw data pollsters collect is insufficient to indicate anything meaningful about voter opinions.
(3) In order to make their abysmal response rates appear to be valid, pollsters employ a series of weighted calculations. However, Mike Murphy pointed out, and Chuck Todd agreed, these are based on what happened in past elections--and this election year is like no past election anyone can remember.
(4) As a result of Item 3, Todd and Murphy both heavily stressed that the only polls that matter at all are polls of registered voters. Hence, they both concluded that the McCain bump is nonexistent.
I agree with Arianna's claim that there is method in the madness of the MSM in continually bringing up these polls. They are trying to make the general election cycle into a horse race--or a fist fight. By bringing up the polls, which are all over the map, and selectively quoting from them as well (Media Makes News), they create an artificial sense of drama that, they hope, will keep their ratings up.
Finally, another significant side of this poll game is a factor that author Dan Ariely mentions in his book Predictably Irrational. It's called manipulating the irrational "herding" instinct of humans. If you can convince people that large numbers of other people are "lining up" behind a product, person or idea, they are strongly influenced to follow that lead. Thus, when the MSM continually plays up grossly inaccurate polls that favor McCain--or artificially lower Obama's lead--they have good reason to believe that voters will be influenced in McCain's direction by convincing them the "race is close," when it isn't.
Another example of herding used by the MSM--and the Clinton campaign--is purposely bringing up the fact that in the past 40 years we have only had three terms of Democratic presidents. Hillary did it to convince primary voters that the Clinton mojo could bring about a fourth Democratic term. The MSM version of this "herding" trick is the oft-repeated phrase, "Americans prefer Republicans as president because they are better on foreign policy." Unfortunately for the hopes of the MSM and McCain, what the "herd" saw last week was Obama looking powerfully presidential on his recent foreign tour. In addition, unlike McCain, Obama doesn't stumble over basic geography and ethnic and historical issues every time the subject of foreign affairs arises.