Dick Morris, stand aside. Pat Caddell wants to challenge you for your "most incompetent pollster ever to work for a Democrat" crown and John McLoughlin just wants to embarrass pollsters everywhere.
Despite Gallup's recent clear demonstration of continuing Jewish voter support for Obama, there's always someone trying to gin up controversy where none exists.
Gallup on Jewish voter approval of Obama
Yeah, I know Dick Morris has a track record of always being wrong. But what has he done lately that matches this (from Think Progress)?
Right-wing news outlets have eagerly repeated any and all poll rumors — no matter how flawed — indicating that Jewish American voters are abandoning President Obama and expressing frustration over his handling of the U.S.-Israel relationship. A new poll [PDF] released yesterday by pollsters John McLaughlin and Pat Caddell appears to show that “only two in five Jewish voters (43% ) say they would vote to re-elect President Obama,” except the methodology of the poll and the neutrality of the pollsters is now seriously in question.
Why in question? Inappropriately leading poll questions and non-transparency about McLoughlin and Caddell's role as founders of the organization that commissioned the poll they then ran.
McLaughlin acknowledged his leadership role at Secure America Now in a phone conversation today, and explaining to ThinkProgress why he didn’t provide a contact name yesterday because:
We don’t have any staff yet so that’s what I was looking for. You know, we’re just putting [Secure America Now] together.
The poll makes no mention of the fact that an organization Caddell described as “a grassroots place where people can join up and begin to do things to force [national security and foreign policy] issues into the debate,” commissioned its own founders to conduct the poll.
Adam Serwer had just a classic takedown, calling it "laughably bogus" including this unusual update from Greg Sargent:
I asked Washington Post polling manager Peyton Craighill to assess the value of this poll. His answer was unequivocal:
“This is a clear example of advocacy polling. They’ve generated leading questions to elicit a desired result to prove a point. In no way does this represent neutral, independent research.”
The only thing this poll reveals is the lengths some folks will go to in order to keep alive the storyline that Obama is forever on the verge of losing Jewish support — a claim they evidently hope will become a self-fulfilling prophesy if they repeat it often enough.
A real pollster taking to task a fake one. Priceless.