CNN Circles the Wagons on Polling

[stewert]

Disputes over polling techniques, once the exclusive province of statistic geeks and partisan bloggers, heated up and spilled over to the public domain today.

The well-financed liberal advocacy group, MoveOn.org, inserted the issue into the campaign by taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times which accuses Gallup of "refusing to fix a longstanding problem with their likely voter methodology," and criticized two media outlets, CNN and USA Today, each of which pays Gallup for the polls and the right to release the results.

MoveOn's ad argues: "Gallup's methodology has predicted lately that Republican turnout on Election Day is likely to exceed Democrats' by six to eight percentage points. But exit polls show otherwise: in each of the last two Presidential elections, Democratic turnout exceeded Republican by four to five points. That discrepancy alone can account for nearly all of Bush's phantom 14-point lead," reported by Gallup a couple of weeks ago.

Often, CNN covers contentious issues like this with sound bites from both sides, treating both positions roughly equally. But not this time. After all, a blow to Gallup's reputation as a reliable polling service is also a blow to CNN. So, on the network's "Inside Politics" this afternoon, it dealt with the issue this way:

Anchor Judy Woodruff began by briefly outlining MoveOn's complaint: "ecent polls have shown George W. Bush leading John Kerry and MoveOn.org claims Gallup's polling techniques exaggerate Republican support." Woodruff then gave Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport almost three minutes to respond, uninterrupted, to the charges. Naturally, Newport defended Gallup's methodology, but essentially asked viewers to take it on faith that he knows what he's doing.

End of segment.

Full Story:

http://www.campaigndesk.org/archives/000963.asp

[stewert]

1. Gallup's Newport dodged charges in MoveOn.org ad

Purporting to respond to a full-page ad by MoveOn.org in the September 28 edition of The New York Times, Gallup Poll editor-in-chief Frank Newport dodged the ad's central charge that Gallup's polling methods favor Republicans. On the September 28 edition of CNN's Inside Politics, Newport referred to and purported to answer the following sentence from the ad: "Simply put, Gallup's methodology has predicted lately that Republican turnout on Election Day is likely to exceed Democrats' by six to eight percentage points."

In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, Gallup's polls do skew Republican by including more Republicans in their samples than statistics from the last two presidential elections show are representative of the electorate.

Full Story:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200409290002

[sui generis]

2. Gallup has been stumping using Newport

I've heard this speech on NPR too -

He's just another self-serving republican looking out for his own interests.

[featherman]

3. Simply put... Gallup's assumption is arbitrary

I do understand the theory that from a sample that is weighted for age, geography, gender, their results may show a large proportion of GOP identifiers. This is what they are basing their assumptions on. But this is a problem with the sample.
Statistically it should not be extrapolated to predict a result that is both contrary to historical precedent and actual voter registration breakdowns.
Democrats are still the majority party in this country. Nothing has happened in the past four years to change that in any major shift. On the contrary there are indications that Democrats will actually increase their proportion of the vote this year.

[in_cog_ni_to]

4. Bombard Judy Woodruff and DEMAND she have Moveon.org

representative on to counter her RW Gallup editor-in-chief's bullshit. She's such a wench!

http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?6

email her!



If you are going to have the Gallup editor-in-chief on your show to argue that his polling is fair, I suggest you ALSO have a guest from Moveon.org to counter him. Do you honestly believe that we are going to take HIS word for it that HIS polling methodology is legitimate? It's quite obvious that he polls more republicans in order to skew the results to favor bush. Your having him on by himself with no counter argument PROVES NOTHIING to me. Gallup is no longer a respected, legitimate polling source.

No wonder CNN ratings are so bad.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

5. Gallup is the "Poll of Goebells"!!!

[enough]

6. Remember

What CNN said four years ago


That is a Gallop-CNN-USATODAY poll posted by CNN on OCTOBER 27, 2000.

found in this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x912337#912402