The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Do the Math

7.31.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 2 of 3)

I don't care how "scientific" the polling is, 876 people, or 1,258 people, or even 3,507 people cannot accurately indicate the sense of several million voters across 50 states and the territories.

Add to that the fact that many pollsters have a firm bias about the candidates and can bend the results that way. This is especially true of media-driven polls.

We know that a genuine random sample in these magnitudes cannot possibly be accurate, so they must "adjust" the sample. They never tell us how they "adjust" the polling sample, however. Just as they never tell us how they determine the "margin of error." Ouija board, probably.

If on any given day we could have a complete election -- by secret ballot, of registered voters only -- we would have a firm statement of which candidate is "leading." If we then compared that result with the dozens of polls done on that same day, none of them would give the same result. Proof, if proof be needed? They rarely give the same result as it is, as Robert McCain's article shows.

Does anyone seriously believe that so many voters change their minds so often? Nonsense. That is far harder to believe when the pollsters and the media want us to think that they're changing their minds between two candidates so extraordinarily wide apart in every significant way.

We have polls for two reasons. The media, becrazed with the need to announce the winner, adore them because they can have a new story every day in which they can announce the winner. Pollsters -- so many of them -- do it because they can earn a good living from it, while helping the media to, you guessed it, announce the winner.

Every election year, the polls start with a huge margin which gets closer and closer as we approach November, when the numbers in all the polls show a virtual dead heat. It's the only time all of the pollsters will agree. Beside themselves with glee, the media will report, "too close to call." This is a necessary conclusion because the media will start the race all over again for the election itself, and the day MUST start with a race "too close to call" or there will be no drama.

And the winner is....

...the media!
-- A. C. Santore

HEARTLAND HOW-TO
Re: Peter Ferrara's What Kansas Knows:

As readers of The American Spectator & others, we also know what Kansas knows. It is frustrating that our ostensibly conservative politicians don't work to educate the American public at large that they know this also.

I'll say it again, the wheels came off the conservative leadership the day Tom DeLay was forced to quit Congress. Republicans (not conservatives) said "hooray" and have been in the tall grass ever since. True Conservatives are admittedly still students of liberty, and that political class still needs a leader that will keep them in line.
-- P. Aaron Jones
Fallujah, Michigan

What Harvard tried on Mr. Ferrara, UCLA tried on me when I studied for my Master's in Journalism. It didn't work then; it doesn't work now.
-- Dolores Teus
Arlington, Virginia

Thank you, Peter Ferrarra, for this tremendous article. It is the best encapsulation of the recent history of the Democrats I've read. If the terminally timid and inarticulate Bush could talk like this, he would have been a successful leader. If John McCain could think and talk like this, he would win in a landslide. It's Capitalism, stupid!!
-- Michael G. Novak
Ellicott City, Maryland

HISTORY 101
Re: Lisa Fabrizio's Gullible Travels:

Letter to the Editor

topics:
John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Global Warming, Constitution, Africa, Socialism