Pollster: Media Polls Biased Against Republicans
I don’t put a lot faith in polls and this is why:
Political polls conducted for most media organizations often are biased against Republicans, says Kellyanne Conway, one of the most respected GOP pollsters. As a result, Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain probably is exaggerated and is contributing unfairly to his momentum, says Conway, president and founder of the Polling Company.
Rather than slant the questions, pollsters distort the results by weighting tallies with more responses from people who are likely to vote for Democrats than is warranted, Conway tells Newsmax. For example, they wrongly assume that huge numbers of groups who favor Democrats will show up to vote.
To be sure, “Barack Obama has energized a critical mass of younger people and new voters to actually show up to the polls,” Conway says.
But in some cases, pollsters assume that those who cast votes will be as much as 40 percent Democrats, versus 25 percent Republicans.
“The country’s just not configured that way,” Conway says.
Conway draws an analogy to the way some news organizations endorse Obama, in effect, with their selection of stories and angles to pursue. In the same way, they endorse him through polls by oversampling respondents who are Democrats, Conway says.
“What is the incentive of the major media to have scientific, artfully constructed polling?” Conway says.
By creating the impression that McCain will lose, many media polls are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, Conway says. Because of the attention their polls receive, they depress the turnout for McCain — not to mention cutting into his contributions, endorsements, and support. Read the rest…
Palin Now More Accessible than Obama?
The conventional wisdom is that Sarah Palin doesn’t make herself available to the national news media, but as this CBS News story shows that simply isn’t true.
It was less than two weeks ago when Sarah Palin astonished her traveling press corps by lifting the curtain (literally) and journeying to the back of her campaign plane to answer reporters’ questions for the first time after 40 days on the campaign trail. But the candidate who has been criticized for having a bunker mentality when it came to the national media can now lay legitimate claim to being more accessible than either Joe Biden or Barack Obama.
In the past two days alone, Palin has answered questions from her national press corps on three separate occasions. On Saturday, she held another plane availability, and on Sunday, she offered an impromptu press conference on the tarmac upon landing in Colorado Springs. A few minutes later, she answered even more questions from reporters during an off-the-record stop at a local ice cream shop.
By contrast, Biden hasn’t held a press conference in more than a month, and Obama hasn’t taken questions from his full traveling press corps since the end of September.
One of my biggest complaints about the McCain campaign is how they handled Gov. Palin after she was announced as John McCain’s running mate. Personally, I think they made a huge mistake by keeping her away from the media in the weeks after the convention. They would have been much better off scheduling interviews on talk radio so she could introduce herself and tell her story directly to voters.
H/T: Ed Morrissey.
Was She or Wasn’t She???
All morning long I’ve been hearing and reading media reports quoting an “unnamed republican source” as saying that “the team assigned to vet … [Sarah] Palin in Alaska” didn’t get there until the day before John McCain “stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice.”
I’d like to know exactly who this source is and what his or her motivations are… My gut reaction is that it’s someone with an ax to grind against John McCain or more likely Sarah Palin.
The McCain campaign says Sarah Palin was thoroughly vetted and that Palin had informed them of about her daughters pregnancy, her husbands DUI arrest 22 years ago and discussed the so called “troopergate scandal” with them.
Personally, I don’t put much stock in what amounts to gossip from unnamed sources and you shouldn’t either… I have no doubt that the McCain campaign vetted Palin and determined that what they found in no way disqualifies her from being vice president. And the truth is it doesn’t… My gut feeling is that Palin’s nomination has the left, and some on the right rattled and that they’re resorting to campaign of whispered rumors and innuendo to destroy her or at least her candidacy.
On a related note… It seems the love affair between John McCain and the media is apparently over… Welcome to the Republican party John, they were bound to turn on you sooner or later.