Didn't Robert Novak use polls to convince Gore to accept defeat in 2000?
Correct me if I'm wrong. I have a vague remembrance of Robert Novak adding fuel to the punditry bonfire to get Gore to concede the 2000 presidential election. Novak was a hard-core right-winger who eventually died by a brain tumor. It's hard to believe that our side even gave him any credence at all, but that was back when Democrats would buckle because someone would convince them it was "for the good of the country."
What I remember about Novak was how he flaunted an on-line poll to show that most people wanted Gore to concede. And it was compelling. The thing is, we only discovered later that these on-line polls would allow individuals to vote as many times as they wanted to. It was the year 2000, afterall, back when we still had software that used two digits to connote the year, rendering the software obsolete after the year 1999.
After we understood the on-line poll glitch, where unlimited access was allowed, there were many many more years where the media would poll more Republicans than Democrats, and never explained the skew in their reports.
Since then, I listen to the hype and not the numbers. When someone flaunts a poll to justify someone stepping down, I automatically ignore them because, in today's world polls can be easily manipulated. There is so much data on all of us, that anyone with access to a prospecting service already knows how we are likely to answer a question before they even dial our phone numbers. Even then, they're only accessing those of us with landlines.
Polling is so unreliable, especially in today's world.
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