Oct 16th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
The Obama Poll Conspiracy
Check out this long explanation of why McCain’s really ahead!
41 Responses to “The Obama Poll Conspiracy”
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October 16th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
matt can you sum it up in a couple sentences. im going to go out drinking tonight and i can’t afford to lose the brain cells. thanks.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Don’t get too cocky. Remember New Hampshire in the primary.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Rush awesomely explained yesterday that ACORN was behind Obama’s poll margins. Since some polls are of “registered” voters and they were inflating the number of registered democrats.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Someone has way too much time on their hands…
http://www.sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/
October 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I got lost at the part where Obama was going to resurrect the dead on Planet Jupiter. Something about Toynbee’s idea in 2001?
October 16th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Pollsters monitor some of the calls that are made precisely to ensure that this isn’t happening. Also phone banks validate some percentage of the calls to make sure this isn’t happening. Also internet polls aren’t subject to any such phenomenon and they agree with the phone polls.
Cosnpiracy theorists are desperate idiots.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Zombie voters unleashed by evil scientists at Acorn have been sucking the brains out of Republicans for the last 8 years. It explains a lot.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
SUSA uses robocalling and shows the same results. On the other hand, maybe the robots know about Obama’s secret RoboLiberation proposals and are subconsciously transmitting their preferences too.
Anyway, anyone who believes this sort of thing can get 6:1 or 7:1 odds on McCain winning- go ahead, make yourself rich.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I got lost at the part where Obama was going to resurrect the dead on Planet Jupiter. Something about Toynbee’s idea in 2001?
OT: whatever happened to those things? Manhattan seems poorer for their absence.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
That website is insane, by the way.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
If you can stand with hand over heart and say you read that all the way through, you have my sincere admiration. Now go have a drink, you’ve earned it.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
OT: whatever happened to those things? Manhattan seems poorer for their absence.
—-
The guy who was most likely behind them died a few years ago. It seems like there is at least one artist still out there paying homage to the originals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toynbee_tiles
October 16th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
OT: whatever happened to those things? Manhattan seems poorer for their absence.
Come on down to Philly. We still have them every other block.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
That was hysterical. THE ONION should hire that guy.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
The thing that’s interesting about so many of the wingnut comments is that they exist in such a vacuum. And I don’t mean just that they don’t seem to respond to anyone outside their world, but it’s interesting how many of them don’t say take account of the economy when they’re talking about the election. They act like all of this is occurring in a stable period like say 1996 or 1988. The few wingnuts who talk about the economy seem to think all they need to do is bring up Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and cutting the capital gains tax, and they’ve done their bit to shore up the economy.
George Bush gets too much blame for the past 8 years. He is merely a representative of what the modern-day Republican Party/conservative movement has evolved into. People say Bush isn’t curious but has anyone noticed any burning curiosity in the wingnut community?
October 16th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I particularly like his alternate reality analysis of the 1968 election — that everyone thought Humphrey had it in the bag and that there was no way Nixon could possibly win.
October 16th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Zombie has a point. So much of a point, in fact, that voters will continue to claim to support Obama by actually voting for him when they get to the polls–that’s how pervasive the methodological bias is! We need a way to disaggregate votes in a way that permits us to separate genuine expressions of preference (which, as has been documented, are overwhelmingly Republican) from spurious ones (which are Democratic).
October 16th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I post now and then about polling on my blog (http://trueconservative.typepad.com/), and here’s what’s hilarious:
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting a shitload of visitors who arrived after googling for “conservative polling” (or similar).
Desperately seeking self-delusion. Does that describe the hard right accurately?
October 16th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
The illusory quest for conformist decision-making in the 2008 presidential election
What? Who the fuck is that guy?
October 16th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Somebody needs to get out of their bunker more often.
October 16th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
“But the unreliability of polls overall is a different field of study which others have covered in detail and which is beyond the scope of this essay.”
Umm, isn’t that the WHOLE POINT OF THE ESSAY? He completely ignores the fact that most of the firms polling now, both at the state and national level, have been polling for the whole primary season, and we have TONS of data on those results (pretty much the whole basis for Nate Silver’s work). They also polled in 2004, and there was no evidence of a massive over-representing of John Kerry’s numbers. We know FOR A FACT that Obama overperformed the polling in the primaries by a few points, so unless you compound the theory by arguing the pollsters were in the tank for Hillary before they switched to Obama in the summer, you’re not going to get anywhere.
Would it shock me if one of the states currently leaning Obama (NC, MO, even OH) ended up going for Obama, somewhat against the polls even if the rest of his numbers stay strong? Of course not. But we’re not talking about an election that’s close right now, and all the hand-waving by wingnuts can’t change that simple fact.
October 16th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
That was an embarrassing rant straight out of the psychology section of Wikipedia, at about the level of a bright 12th grader.
Someone has way too much time on their hands…
Of course “Zombia” has too much time on his hands. This is the guy who goes to every damn Bay Area protest by A.N.S.W.E.R. and the Students for Palestine and takes pictures of the small number of crazies, in order to feed the eliminationist delusions of the Little Green Footballs readership.
I had figured the guy was a neo-con who thought he was pulling people’s strings — I didn’t realize how deluded he was, himself. He’s still “anonymous,” but we at least know one thing now — he’s not a social scientist.
October 16th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
That’s a fascinating analysis. And very long. But it could be pared down quite a bit with a razor of some sort–I think Occam has a good one…
October 16th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
please tell me that was an essay as performance art.
October 16th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Shorter “Obama Poll Conspiracy”: People’s opinions don’t necessarily reflect what they think they believe. Therefore they actually support McCain, but just don’t know it.
October 16th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
He has very good spelling for someone in his mental state.
October 16th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
The Silent Majority
It’s tanned, it’s rested, it’s ready to run again, and to win in 2008!
Wow! I just though the article cited was going to be merely ridiculous, until I got to the last line and the mention of our very old friend, the silent majority, and all of a sudden I was 18 again. Nothing brings the old days back like the mention of old friends!
Well, hopefully in less than three weeks we will be holding some funerals for som old friends form the Nixon era. There’s the Vietnam War, it’s looking sickly and peaked, at least as a determiner of who wins our elections. And the Southern Strategy — the prognosis is grim. And now the silent majority — back in mention just as it seems on its deathbed. Can’t say it will be an untimely end for any of these old friends. Here’s hoping we can throw all of them a Jazz Funeral on November 5, and never have to think about any of them ever again, except as warnings to future generations. Pearlstein can read the eulogy.
October 16th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
After 30 years of wearing glasses, I am getting contact lenses for the first time in an hour.
I am so freaking nervous it is silly, and I have been laughing at myself all day.
I sure wish I had some of what that guy was smoking. It would make the next couple of hours much easier to take.
October 16th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Golly, that’d be a fascinating analysis, if only there was the least scrap of evidence that it pertained to this election at all. Unfortunately for him, there isn’t.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
It seems that his theories could just as easily be applied to right wing voters, and the ony reason, in a country that is relatively split,that these two bases would not cancel each other out is that obama and biden actually were winning these debates.
October 16th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Here John Kerry’s 298-240 victory in 2004, accordingly to the November 1 polls. Obama’s up 2% among Gallup’s likely right now . . . it’s going to be a BLOWOUT!!!!
October 16th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
In such an environment, where admitting to disliking Obama in the interpersonal sphere has become the equivalent of social suicide, it seems very likely that the Bradley Effect is not just back, but back with a vengeance.
Is that is his excuse for not having any friends?
He seems to think that the silent majority of McCain supporters are whimpering cowards who are afraid that liberals will call them racist. So why were they temporarily emboldened to stand up to those liberal robocalls during the first week of September? Maybe they thought the liberals would approve because there was a woman for VP, but then when it turned out that liberals didn’t like her they had to go back to pretending to support Obama.
October 16th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Of course everyone is wrong about this article. I believed what I read here. Posted like a fool. Started reading the comments as I was wondering who would have time, and on the right, the ability to write something like this? This guy destroys sacred cows. He wrote it as, well I am not sure as what. But he made this up to be making it up. Does he think the wing-nuts believe this? Yes, in fact many responded in the initial comments on how true it is even though when you read it, you realize that its utter made up nonsense and reality, says actually nothing that makes sense. It just superficially seems “right.” Later comments quickly clue you into this. I apologized for being so stupid, but the wing-nuts just slinked away. It also goes to show how easily the “enlightened liberal elite” can be fooled.
October 16th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Gee, thanks, Matt… that article ate my braaaains!
October 17th, 2008 at 8:43 am
“Somebody needs to get out of their bunker more often.”
He does, usually to take photos of far-lefty gatherings. Not sure why, but it seems to do something for him…
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