Newsbiscuit hits the spot again

Are you getting tired of polls and pundits telling you the likely outcome of elections only for them to get things spectacularly wrong ??

Over to NewsBiscuit for another slice of 'on the money' irony

Polls predicting pollsters will get US election wrong, may be wrong

Key national opinion polls in the 2008 US election race may be wildly inaccurate according to a new poll of opinion polls. However, pundits have predicted that the new poll will prove to be wrong as American voters take to the polls in the next round of US primaries.

Cole Lymon of McBride Munro McBride conceded: “We got it wrong in Iowa, we got it wrong in New Hampshire and we got it wrong in Michigan and Florida. But I am totally confident that we will get it wrong on Super Tuesday. Of course there is always a chance we might get it right, but that would be such an abberation, that that would actually be wrong as well.’

Sol Brockstein, a commentator on NSBC’s Election Round-Up, and a former blogger for the Clinton campaign, penned a strongly worded letter in the New York Times in which he condemned ‘the more lunatic fringes of the polling community’. His attack appeared to be aimed at those pollsters who had predicted a landslide for Democrat John Edwards in Iowa; a late swing to Republican Fred Thompson in New Hampshire and a possible win by an outsider in Michigan. Among the outsiders named were Osama Bin Laden (due to misprinted ballot forms), Justin Timberlake (not running) and John F Kennedy (who was assassinated in 1963).

Analysis of the early polls by research firm Hudson Hall concluded that there were too many pollsters involved in the elections, although, conflicting research by the Hayz Institute in Michigan concluded that voters felt they weren’t being polled enough.

And yet the average American has now been polled at least seventeen times since the election campaign began. By the time the battle moves on to the race for the White House the entire American population will have been polled at least fifty-six times and will have changed their mind an estimated 70% of the time, usually while actually being questioned.

Cole Lymon adds: ‘I think that pollsters, pundits, bloggers, opinion formers, lobbyists and marketeers have overlooked an underlying characteristic of the American voter. Sometimes the shit they do is just plain weird.’ Frank Trudeau of pollsters Lupus agrees. ‘The bottom line is no-one really knows what the American people are thinking, or indeed if they are. I don’t know, what do you think?’

Posted: 5 February 2008 by darkbill