Yesterday, I posted about the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It isn’t surprising that King and Michael talked about the STrib’s poll during the Final Word this afternoon. King mentioned that the new polling company has been around a long time. If King says that they’re a reputable firm, that’s good enough for me. That means I won’t cast aspersions on the polling company.

What I will do, though, is talk about media polls in general because I think that there are different motives for media polls.

If we’re talking about the AP-Ipsos poll, my first assumption is that it’s used to ‘create news’, which is then cited in later stories that follow a desired storyline. That storyline usually is that Democrats are poised to mop the floor with the GOP.

The way that they achieve that storyline is by vastly oversampling Democrats and undersampling Repblicans. Another trademark of the AP-Ipsos poll is that they all but eliminate independents. I recall seeing an AP-Ipsos poll where 47% of the people sampled identified themselves as Democrats, 37% identified themselves as Republicans, with the remaining 16% identifying themselves as independents.

I first noticed the AP-Ipsos polling in 2005, though they’ve been around longer than that. The reason why I noticed them was that they were tanking President Bush’s JA ratings. I didn’t think President Bush was doing a great job by any stretch of the imagination but I didn’t think he’d tanked that bad at that time. That led me to check the sampling.

What I found was that things broke almost perfectly along party identification lines. the net negative JA Rating was almost identical to the party breakdowns.

Later, in 2006, I noticed how frequently dreadful poll numbers got reported. Certainly, people were upset with Republicans for immigration and their loose spending habits. There was no doubt that conservatives were upset with President Bush. Still, I got the impression that the constant drumbeat of dreadful poll after dreadful poll was intended to drive down conservative turnout.

Was it inevitable that GOP turnout would be less in 2006 than in 2002? Definitely. That isn’t the most important question though. This is: Did these polls drive turnout down more than if they hadn’t been reported with that frequency? I can answer with total certainty that the 2006 polls drove down turnout.

The point is this: The various polls show tha the race is over. That’s what they said in August, too.

GOP strategists stuck inside DC’s Beltway say that this might be a worse year for the GOP than 2006. These so-called strategists aren’t getting their information from GOP activists because we’re ready to run through walls for the House GOP caucus and for Sarah Palin.

MSM Effect

In this instance, the MSM I’m referring to isn’t the mainstream media. I’m referring to a new MSM, namely that Message Still Matters.

It’s time we stopped paying attention to the polling. It’s time our candidates started running with a Palin-like confidence. It’s time that we stood for 3 simple principles that Reagan and Goldwater stood for. Those 3 principles are liberty, prosperity and security.

• If we tell people our vision for achieving longterm prosperity, we’ll appeal to alot of voters.
• If we explain to voters how our policies translate into greater security, whether we’re talking about national security, retirement security or homeland security, we’ll win lots of elections.
• If we tell people that our policies must pass the ‘liberty test’, meaning that we won’t pass legislation that limits our freedoms, then we’ll appeal to alot of voters.

These are appealing messages. This summer, I had the opportunity to tell a community leader what I believed. I told this leader that 2006 didn’t have to happen again. I told this leader this:

“It isn’t like the American people suddenly said that they got sick of stable marginal tax rates, that they didn’t suddenly say tha they got sick of seeing their taxes being spent too efficiently, that they didn’t stop saying that they felt too safe against future terrorist attacks.”

Polls matter but message matters more.

Technorati Tags: Polling, GOTV, Election 2006, Election 2008, MSM, Minnesota Poll, AP-Ipsos, SurveyUSA

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

1. Is it possible that Democrats will be oversampled in the general election?

   Comment by Michael Ejercito — October 5, 2008 @ 9:50 am

2. Most polling firms lean to the left, so it is hardly unexpected that they will oversample Democrats and undersample Republicans and Independents. Yes, the author is entirely right; the current polling is being used to create the news that the election is over, more than a month before election day. It is designed to discourage conservatives and Republicans; Rush Limbaugh has been talking about all of this for the past week or two. It’s important that Republicans actually vote and not let the opinion-makers decide the election for us.

   Comment by Timothy C Sable — October 5, 2008 @ 2:45 pm

3. Very important that conservatives and Republicans note this in the next month. Also, I note that the conservative Republicans I know are very fired up for this election. Nothing like 2006. In my neighborhood, there are a lot of Obama signs. No surprise for it is Blue California. But I am amazed at how many McCain signs are up. For this area it is a lot. There is hope. I think that Saracuda is the differnce. And she needs to find a way to get that through to McCain. It will be a closer election than anyone thinks at this point.

   Comment by Mark J. Goluskin — October 5, 2008 @ 3:30 pm

4. THat all may be true. But with 70 to 90 % of the population being against the bailout, McCain blew a huge opportunity last week by not taking a stand against it.

   All Obama had to do was sit tight.

   Comment by T A Gray — October 5, 2008 @ 6:43 pm

5. Good research. Well done!

   Comment by Pasadena Closet Conservative — October 6, 2008 @ 5:36 am

6. THat all may be true. But with 70 to 90 % of the population being against the bailout, McCain blew a huge opportunity last week by not taking a stand against it.

   All Obama had to do was sit tight.

   This is true.

   Of course, Obama did not take a stand against the bailout either, so he did not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

   Comment by Michael Ejercito — October 6, 2008 @ 10:16 am

7. The two biggest problems with McCain is that there is hardly any enthusiasm for him, and that he is effective a campaigner as John Kerry was.

   Comment by Michael Ejercito — October 6, 2008 @ 5:37 pm

8. Well, when the full impact of this credit disaster hits, the next four years are not going to be a good time to be President of the United States.

   There’s going to be a lot of ’splaining to do, and as far as I can tell, which ever party wins, it could not happen to a nicer bunch.

   I dont think 700 trillion is going to come close to fixing this.

   Comment by T A Gray — October 6, 2008 @ 11:35 pm

9. What is the nature of this credit disaster?

   Comment by Michael Ejercito — October 7, 2008 @ 9:21 am

10. THe real iceberg Michael is the trillions (estimated at around 800,000,000,000,000 of dollars worth of dirivatives (bonds, insurance, and credit notes) based on all these sub prime loans and sold to other banks here, and over the world as investments. Bear Stearns, failure last summer was the bellweather event, as confidence in these notes dries up, more and more banks who own them will demand payment. Its almost like a ponsi scheme, once it starts to collapse the whole pile could implodes. Thats the real reason behind the big push last week by the Fed and Treasury to fund a bailout, and why 700 billion is a drop in the bucket.

    Whats even more insane, is the Congress, in its infinite stupidity, did nothing, NO THING at all in the bail out to change the rules that caused the failures in the first place. (Wouldn’t want to deny anybody the “right” to own a home would we?)

    Total lack of adult supervision in this Congress.

    Comment by T A Gray — October 7, 2008 @ 8:00 pm

11. There are dissenting voices .

    “Many commentators claim, however, that virtually no transactions are occurring in this market. These claims are completely false. For the week that ended October 1, which is the most recent week currently reported, total commercial paper outstanding amounted to $1,607 billion. Yes, this amount was down from the $1,702 billion reported for the previous week, but is a 5.6 percent drop a good reason to panic? If we go back to March 2008, when nobody was talking excitedly about the commercial market’s “freezing up,” we find that the total amount outstanding, on average, was $1,822 billion, or only 13 percent more than last week. In March, the market was working fine; now it’s “locked up.” This sort of hyperbole, with which we are being bombarded hourly around the clock, is totally without a basis in the facts.”

    Comment by Michael Ejercito — October 9, 2008 @ 10:34 am