7 Comments Add your own

• 1. MDH  |  October 8th, 2008 at 6:49 am

  Pat,
  With due respect, have you forgotten the complete unreliability of polls over the pat elections? If you remember, they were certain that John Kerry was a certain winner. So much so, they all but declared it to be.
  They also called Florida for Al Gore and all but pronounced hime President of the United States (and the internet). Ooooops.
  In local elections, I remember some of my good friends indicating that their polls had Doug Scott up by a margin of 6 to 4 over Morrisey. Oooops.

• 2. Pat Cunningham  |  October 8th, 2008 at 8:03 am

  MDH: Your memory is not so good. The final pre-election polls in 2004 generally had Bush ahead of Kerry. See here:
  http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:Hlkk70Tmc70J:www.realclearpolitics.com/bush_vs_kerry.html+bush+kerry+polls&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

  Indeed, the vast majority of polls through the last two months of the campaign had Bush ahead, some of them by double-digit margins.

  As for Florida in 2000, media projections (based on exit polls, not pre-election polls) went back and forth between Gore and Bush all through the night. When I went to bed, I thought Bush had won Florida and the presidency. My wife awoke me at 7 a.m. with news that the matter wasn’t yet settled. If you’ll recall, it took a month to declare Bush the winner, and to this day some people feel Gore was robbed.

  In short, exit polling is trickier than pre-election polling. Your dismissal of the current pre-election polls has little or no basis in history, at least not in the past 50 years. Any presidential candidate going into an election with an average lead of, say, 5 percentage points, is almost certain to win.

  As for your little anecdote about polls in the last Rockford mayoral election, I’m not buying it. I doubt that those polls were sufficiently scientific. There were no such polls published or broadcast in the local media.

  So, all in all, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

  UPDATE: One more thing about the 2000 contest: The final pre-election Gallup poll had Bush at 48 percent and Gore at 46 percent. The actual vote tally turned out with Gore at 48 percent and Bush at 47.9 percent. In other words, given the margin of error in any poll, Gallup had it right.

• 3. Billybeermonicagar  |  October 8th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

  I also think that poll had Gore up by 11-12 pts. a few weeks before the election.

• 4. MDH  |  October 8th, 2008 at 2:16 pm

  Pat,
  So….based on your expertise……are you calling it over? Obama wins?

• 5. Pat Cunningham  |  October 8th, 2008 at 3:25 pm

  MDH: With nearly four weeks remaining, I’m not calling anybody the winner. Things can happen. But Obama’s situation right now is far more enviable than McCain’s. You need 270 electoral votes to win. Obama is leading in states with a total of 320 electoral votes, while McCain is leading in states with a total of 163 electoral votes. States currently considered toss-ups have 55 electoral votes. So, if McCain holds onto all the states where he’s leading and captures all the toss-up states and also picks up 50 of the electoral votes from states where Obama is now leading, he’ll still lose. In other words, he’s got a pretty big mountain to climb. It’s not impossible, but it’s never been done, as far as I know. Here’s another way of looking at it: There’s a Web site (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/) that regularly conducts 10,000 computer simulations of the election, using poll numbers and historical data. The most recent projection is that Obama has one chance in three of winning by an electoral landslide (that is, with more than 375 electoral votes). McCain’s chances of winning an electoral landslide are one in 200. The smart money is on Obama, at this point. But, as I say, things can happen.

• 6. Pat Cunningham  |  October 8th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

  Billy Beer: Bush was ahead in every Gallup tracking poll through the last three weeks of the campaign:

  Oct17 Bush 48 Gore 42
  Oct18 Bush 49 Gore 39
  Oct19 Bush 50 Gore 40
  Oct20 Bush 51 Gore 40

  Oct21 Bush 50 Gore 41
  Oct22 Bush 46 Gore 44
  Oct23 Bush 45 Gore 46
  Oct24 Bush 48 Gore 43
  Oct25 Bush 49 Gore 42
  Oct26 Bush 52 Gore 39
  Oct27 Bush 49 Gore 42
  Oct28 Bush 49 Gore 42
  Oct30 Bush 47 Gore 44
  Oct31 Bush 48 Gore 43

  Nov1 Bush 47 Gore 43
  Nov2 Bush 48 Gore 42
  Nov3 Bush 47 Gore 43
  Nov4 Bush 48 Gore 43
  Nov5 Bush 47 Gore 45
  Nov6 (last poll before the election)
  Bush 48 Gore 46

• 7. Billybeermonicagar  |  October 8th, 2008 at 4:42 pm

  Sorry Pat, I had it wrong. I remembered it the other way around.

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