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Friday, January 4, 2008
Pollsters Clueless on Why
Maybe the only thing left to say about Iowa that’s relevant to this blog is that those people with those freaking exit polls continued to delude the nation about how democracy work.
On every channel on Thursday — or darn near every one — there was somebody something like what Soledad O’Brien said in her duet with William Scheider on CNN. “We’re now going to tell you WHY people voted the way they did,” she said (if I’ve got the precise words right). Then Schneider provided the answers.
The Schneiders everywhere said Obama won because people were more interested in “change” than in “experience,” and the people who were interested in “change” went with Obama.
Also, the CNN duet said, Obama won because the voters thought he would do best in dealing with this issue and that issue and the other issue. Schneider said that the voters even thought Obama would do better on health care than Clinton, though that has always been thought to be her issue.
And Huckabee won because people were more interested in having a president who shares their values than in having one who (fill in the blank; I forget). And they felt Huckabee shares their values.
As Ira Gershwin might have said, it’s all bananas.
Of COURSE people who are planning to support Obama will tell you they are more interested in change than experience. Duh! Once you know that Obama has won, you know that most people are going to say they favor change over experience. There’s no point in asking.
Of COURSE people who are planning to support him will tell you he’s better on the issues. What should we expect them to says, “I think she’d be better in dealing with the nation’s problems, but I’m for him just because”?
In all of this, there’s no justification for the pollsters pretense that they know what’s cause and what’s effect. Are people supporting Obama because they value “change”? Or are they just saying they value change because that’s his issue, and they want to justify their vote? Your guess is a as good anybody else’s.
A stark example comes to mind of how exit polls can mislead: In a mayoral election in Chicago in the 1980s, there was a corruption issue. About half the voters said the believed a certain candidate’s denial of wrongdoing. The other half said they didn’t. When it came to voting, the two groups split as you might expect.
It so happened, however, that one candidate was white and got overwhelming support from whites, and the other was black and got overwhelming support from blacks. If you were to judge from the exit polls, you would conclude that whites and blacks have different ways of evaluating evidence. Please! They were just going with their guy and telling the pollsters what they wanted to tell them.
If you want to believe that the “change” issue help Obama, fine. But intuition tells you that. You don’t need exit polls. The exit polls also suggest that specific policy issues helped him. What that tells you is the exit polls are bunk.
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