Undoubtedly, the nightly news will either lead with, or feature the ABCNEWS.com Poll saying that 6 in 10 people (margin of error of 4% in the poll (itself 450% greater than the difference separating the two candidates in Florida)). The poll was taken last night after the Bush presentation and, shockingly, shows people preferring that Gore stepped down after Bush asked him to do just that. Knowing the timing of the poll, did we expect something different? Given that every single poll save one had Gore trailing Bush by anything from 2 to 5 percentage points on election eve, with Nader at 5%, and comparing those polls with the outcome, I am supposed to believe that this is a true representation of how America feels today at 4pm?

Let's review what the polls told us was going to happen before the election with such assurity that stories were being run about how Bush was planning to lobby the electoral college to switch their votes after the election. The pollsters would have had us believe that Bush would win the popular vote in the country by anywhere from 2-8 percentage points and probably the election itself.. There was a possibility, they told us, that he would win the popular vote, but lose the electoral college. The prospect of this prompted the Bush campaign to generate a strategy of lobbying the electors from every state to try and get them to change their vote. Can you imagine a scene like the one in Miami Dade last week out in front of the electors houses, complete with paid operatives standing in as protestors and people bussed in from all neighboring states? Moreover, each organization told us that Ralph Nader and the Greens would take 5% of the popular vote and thus usher in a new era of tri-party politics in the years to come.

This was the incessant mantra of each polling group until America went to the polls and showed me what I had suspected and what a few people (Rick Lazio included) had said was happening. The polling organizations are owned or at least hired by the news organizations in order to make news. Gallup Polls (one I had long held as a paragon of polling integrity) admitted that they poll different groups of people each day and thus wind up with different results. Perhaps this would explain why, the day after the story was broken by the left-leaning media, Gore hit a late-season low in the polls of 38%. It was as if the pollsters were saying, "Yes we rig our polls and fuck you for saying so."

I can therefore only attribute the ABCNews poll to nothing more than news making. They asked people if they thought Al Gore should step down after Bush proposed it. It's like asking the jury in a case to rule after the prosecution makes its case, and then telling the nation how the nation feels about the issue.
- posted by levinson @ 11/27/2000 03:00:00 PM