From Wikipedia on the 1960 election:
Op cit, 1968:
1976:
1992
2000
2004 from CNN (Date: November 1)
Bush would win Ohio, Kerry won Pennsylvania.
You may not like it, but polls have been way off before.
You are simply wrong.
Polls do not necessarily measure the thing they are trying to measure because of design flaws in the pools, how they are given, how the sample size is selected, etc. There’s a new book out on this but damned if I an find it right now.
The margin of error may be higher on these polls than the polls report, so Obama up by 5 may still be within the margin of error.
Also, your attitude is dangerous and is the main reason I may not sleep on election night if Obama doesn’t win (i.e., I may have to stay up late with my buddies Smith and Wesson).
I’ll send your rollyeyes a postcard, but I’m pretty damn sure Obama’s a lock.
And which is why no candidate is going to lose the election if he’s up by 10% in states with 270 electoral votes. Electoral fraud in this country could throw the results of a close-run thing (diddle with the voting machines or ballot boxes in a few crucial precincts in one or a few crucial states); but I don’t believe that anybody could steal a U.S. Presidential election in the face of a blow-out victory from the other side.
Heh, let’s see:
(i) What questions asked? “So, who ya gonna vote for?” This isn’t like welfare reform (“Do you think hard-working taxpayers should have their money taken and given to able-bodied people who can’t even be bothered to get a job?”/“Do you think mothers of little helpless innocents should have the pittance they need to feed their families taken from them?”) or assault weapons (“Do you think military-style Death Guns specifically designed to mow down large numbers of innocent children should be banned?”/“Do you support a ban on certain guns which are really functionally no different from your Uncle Ned’s huntin’ rifle, just because of the way they look?”) And again, multiple polls by various different organizations; they can’t all be asking voters “So, will you be voting for the Good and Virtuous Obama, or are you a racist bastard who’ll be voting for Wicked and Evil McCain?”
(ii) Well, Presidential ballots in this country don’t give a “none of the above” either. Barring maybe a really close analysis of the chads, there’s no way to tell the difference between someone who goes in the voting booth and says “All RIGHT!!!” and someone who goes in the voting booth and says “Oh…Geez…Oh, well, what the hell.” There are third-party candidates–my sense is that the Libertarians (presumably taking from the Republicans) will do at least as well this year as the Greens or Ralph Nader (presumably taking from the Democrats); but there is no Ross Perot or John Anderson out there with any real chance of making a major difference in the vote totals.
There is the issue of who will actually bother to go and vote. This is the difference between “registered voters” and “likely voters”, something pollsters do struggle with defining. That also gets us into (iii), and I agree that sampling and the issue of party weighting is one where pollsters could easily screw up and skew the results.
Again though, are multiple organizations all skewing the results the same direction? And is there reason to believe a priori the results aren’t being skewed away from Obama, and that he won’t actually do better than the polls are projecting? (See above regarding black and young voters.)
You’re not doing too well tonight, I’ve noticed. This particular comment doesn’t enhance your credibility, either. I’d thank you not to make absurd and inflammatory statements that characterize gun owners as lunatics and/or paranoids. We get enough of that around here without someone saying something like this and feeding the fire.
An effect that has been called into severe question in recent weeks, and repudiated by pollsters who were actually involved in the race.
Which is one of the more famous results of incompetent sampling in polls.
Please, Airman. The way polls were conducted in 1948 is about as relevant to the way they’re conducted to today as 15th century alchemy is to modern, peer-reviewed science.
Today’s polling methods are, on the whole, highly accurate. Taking the totality of all results of polls to date, one can be confident beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama is legitimately winning. That may not be the case on November 3 - a lot can happen in two weeks - but it absolutely is today.
But let me rephrase the question. Suppose McCain has another weekus horribilis like he did the week of Spetember 15 and his poll numbers absolutely crater; I’m talking Nixon-McGovern 1972. On November 3, Obama has a 19-point lead, 375 EVs in the bag, and McCain isn’t actually solid in any state in the union. Texas is going to be a fifty-fifty thing. In fact, McCain stopped campaigning four days before the election - and on election day, in defiance of exit polls as well, McCain wins. What would your reaction be?
What would ivylass do?
And find an empty office. They changed their name to Premier Election Solutions in 2007.
I seem to recall that intrade puts McCain at 15%, while fivethirtyeight.com has him at 6%. Neither of those figures is less than 1%.
McCain could win. It’s not probable, but an Obama victory is simply not a sure thing. And while the polls interview thousands of Americans, the sample of relevant American elections that we’re working off of is necessarily small.
The OP:
Many would suspect voting fraud. Coming after the stolen election of 2000, I posit that if McCain emerges as victor, half the country will go insane.
I’d go over to Ayers’s house to console Obama, then go bomb some abandoned buildings or something.
I don’t really have the liberty to leave the country (at least not without living in physical fear for my safety and we’re not there yet- we’re saving that for President Palin). I’d bitch, moan, whine, and complain, and possibly at some point move to a battleground state.
Well, it’d mean I am not coming back to America for at least 4 more years, so I would call and cancel the flight I have booked on the 6th of November. I’d also call the real estate agent I have been working with and tell her we are not going to be buying the house anytime soon.
Tricky bastards!
Well, that was a little hyperbolic (is that a word?) I’ll admit. I’m a gun owner, and I don’t think I’m a lunatic or paranoid. I just see all of this “Obama already won” sentiment, and I hope it doesn’t erupt into violence if that turns out not to be the case.
There are some extremely violent elements on the left (i.e., the far left, people who think the Democrats are too right wing). Witness the masked individuals blocking Palin’s motorcade as a recent example.
There are nutjobs on both ends of the political spectrum. Those on the Right tend to be more likely to have guns, though.
Neither Obama or McCain has a lock. Partisans of each should keep working hard to win, and neither be overconfident and slack off, nor despair and give up.
Except that they could just fudge things in Fla and Ohio,etc. Each State conducts it’s elections the same way state-wide
That’s your idea of “extremely violent” ? People who endanger themselves ? This is more violent than people who beat gays to death or murder doctors who perform abortions or who blow up federal buildings how ?
And you think the “far left” consists of most of the industrialized world ?
I agree that if the election were held today and McCain won, it would most definitely be fraud. Obama leads in every reputable poll. Literally dozens of them. Most by a substantial margin. But electorally it is more substantial, as others have demonstrated upthread. And again, these numbers are the averages of all the polls. Statistitians are putting McCain’s chances around 3-10% taking into account the polls could change from now till election day. I would bet they’d all say McCain’s chances if held today would be 0%. I have a feeling some people would still say it was the polls that were wrong even if they all had Obama with a 90 point lead but McCain won.
One the one hand, I’d be furious. In 2006 I saw my county clerk simply fail to deliver enough ballots to one precinct for no clear reason. I expect GOP chicanery out of sheer habit.
Then I’d cackle in glee. With Mac in, the Religious Right would have every expectation of getting another pro-life (pro-business, anti-environment) justice on SCOTUS. And a GOP President & his sycophantic “opposition” (Pelosi’s probably still around in this scenario) would get the full fallout from Bushco.
Paulson [del]might have to scramble to change course & not screw the country over[/del] would continue to get all he can for Goldman Sachs in his lame duck 75 days (what does he care about the party?), & McCain would see his government fall down around his ears.
Death of the GOP, baby. This Will Hurt. Like a rusted spike in the eye.
Probably our best hope for a total leftist revolution.