Post-election
polls that took a deeper look at the "values" issue buttressed Langer's view.
"They were making the runs on all kinds of
polls," says Aurora Duron, AFL-CIO Tucson coordinator of the My Vote-My Right Campaign.
This example illustrates one of the most common mistakes people make in reading
polls: thinking of the percentages as precise points, when they're actually more like fuzzy blobs.
The most obvious evidence cutting against the historical trend of elections featuring incumbents being won or lost by large margins is that opinion
polls have consistently shown Bush and Kerry running neck and neck.
Eisinger's argument, which is well supported by archival and interview evidence, is that the rise of private presidential
polls emerged from the complex interaction among a common motivation shared by each president (autonomy), the technology of polling itself, and the idiosyncrasies of the individual presidents and their pollsters (pp.
OSU, which got 235 points in the
poll, was one point behind No.
If we Americans continue to allow ourselves to be influenced by
polls, we might as well tear up the Constitution, abolish Congress, and ask a pollster to discover what we should do about everything.
Polls among paper industry professionals are even more interesting to me since part of my job is to understand what is happening to this industry and how people feel about it.
Bogart relates anecdotes of desperately trying to reassure his paymasters at Esso Brazil of the value of the
polls he was conducting for them on the very day that America's major pollsters miscalled the Truman-Dewey presidential contest in 1948; of Croatian fascists-turned-pollsters enthusiastically joining in on old partisan songs at a Yugoslavian conference; and of the chairman of Revlon interrupting an annual sales meeting to rebuke his 12-year-old son for not doing his homework.
In fact, voters who feel a strong bond with any political party are more likely to go to the
polls than those who don't.
and demanding, "What are you doing here?" She saw them stop one elderly man after he left the
polls and order him to "assume the position." Asked what he was doing, he tried to explain he had just voted (he was, in fact, wearing a button that said "I voted").
News organizations subjected their audiences to a relentless barrage of
polls during the campaign.
