October 24, 2004
Losers justifying their loss: It's the fickle voters, people!
(Warning: Lower your PC's volume before clicking on any of the links below.)
While...national polls show that voters prefer the president over Mr. Kerry by an average of four points, those same surveys place Mr. Bush some 20 points ahead on the question of which candidate is expected to win. "This could be a big cause of concern for Kerry," professor Vicki Morwitz of New York University said. "If people really think Bush is going to win, they may have a slight tendency to shift their preference and ultimately vote for Bush, even though they were a Kerry supporter to begin with."(Emphases mine)Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News, agreed. "If more people (regardless of whom they support) don't start telling pollsters that they believe Kerry will win, he probably can't," Mr. Halperin wrote in ABC's the Note, an online political briefing.
Roughly one-quarter of Kerry supporters who have an opinion on the outcome of the election predict the Massachusetts Democrat will lose, according to polls by Fox News and the TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP). By contrast, only one of 18 Bush supporters who have an opinion on the outcome expect the president to lose.
Do these two really believe that American voters are so wishy-washy that they will CHANGE camps to vote for W because he is hyped to win? That's so absurd. Would YOU?
I can't imagine anyone I know changing their vote for president of the United States in order to vote for the perceived winner. You either vote the way you've always voted or, like me, you change because your convictions dictate it. You don't stand there in the voting booth going 'Eeny meeny miny moe'.
OK. There are the alleged 'undecided' voters. Although I find their supposed indecision hard to believe in, I would bet money that they don't use some poll-ordained frontrunner status as the basis of their final choice. Rooting for the underdog (para 10) is an American tradition, after all.
Are these odd remarks pre-loss spin? No one ever really believed that W was trailing his opponent, but with the MSM going on and on about how close the race is, why the sudden sea change? Saving face, perhaps.
Oh, and all-around great guy Halperin makes a whole lot of sense with his comment about pollsters, doesn't he. Why a Bush supporter would tell a pollster that W's rival is going to win is beyond me. When you believe in your candidate, you believe all the way. The fact that Mr Weathervane's partisans are assuming W's got 4 more years in the bag and are actually telling pollsters that shows a sad lack of conviction about their own candidate. Makes sense, so much of the Democratic platform has been about ousting W and not much else. Except political expediency, of course.
Self-delusion amongst Bush-haters may not have lasted as long the Democratic ticket hoped it would. Reality may be setting in. But spinning it into 'Gosh, you know them fickle as* voters, dumber than dirt, they want to vote for the winning team' after all these months of the Dems and the MSM force-feeding America their hate for Bush...well, it's not very convincing.
Hat tip: Val in TX for 500 words...
Posted by Valerie at October 24, 2004 02:35 AMUndecideds really don't have political opinions, and can easily be swayed by polls. They don't pay attention to politics, so they trust everyone else to. Likewise, both candidates have nominal supporters who are really undecideds that threw their lot in with a candidate because people they knew also did - I'd wager they're even more susceptible to polls, being of a decidedly populist bent in the first place.
Posted by: Doug at October 24, 2004 03:18 AMI'm not sure I can get the argument in my head out on paper. I'll try. It's past 5AM here, but I'll try.
Poll numbers change throughout the campaign. Meaning that people are influenced by, for example, the debates, or by some issue that they finally decide is important enough to care about, or because of...polls...which are always changing. ?
I've read that the numbers of these undecideds is shrinking as they decide. But which poll did they latch on to that finally convinced them which way to go? Polls are always changing.
The MSM fabricated a lot of momentum for Kerry not so long ago. Now, the momentum is in W's favor. So the undecideds who decided when the alleged upswing was going Kerry's way are now going to switch to W? Or does that mean that they had seen W as the underdog and chose him for that reason.
There's a bit of hocus-pocus to the whole 'undecided' issue. And with polls,as we've seen so clearly since the DNC.
I would contend that polls are so easily manipulated by pollsters and press alike and the numbers so up and down that an undecided would never be able to choose on that basis.
Polls can reflect change, as the polls we are seeing now seem to. They seem somewhat more realistic as compared to the skewed post-debate ones. So where is the change coming from? The polls were so pro-Kerry before now that the momentum should logically still be his.
But it's not. So, did the debates have a real effect, all spin aside, on enough undecideds out there to boost W's numbers? But that would mean that the undecideds actually watched the debates rather than look at the polls because if they'd been swayed by the polls, Kerry would be up by 10 points.
It's a bit like where does the circle begin and end.
Valerie,
There have always been people, everywhere, though maybe less in America than in Europe for evident reasons, that are unable to make up their minds alone. Like Doug said, they will vote for someone because people they know vote for that someone. Or they will vote for the guy everyone seem to favor (kind of following the "herd" in a way).
That the polls change constantly is not a problem. Since these people cannot make up their minds, they'll go from one candidate to another. It's not illogical for them.
I personally know several persons I could persuade quite easily to vote for just about anyone. Imo, it's really not so much about voting for the winner. Rather conforming with the general opinion.
Now, what would be more interesting to know is how many Bush-haters, seeing that GWB will indeed win, will be frustrated and decide not to vote in the end.
Posted by: Carine at October 24, 2004 10:56 AMThe polling data shows the number of undecided voters to be minute. Remember too, that there are people out there so offended by getting dinner-time phone calls from polling outfits, that when they DO respond, they tell the caller that they're undecided.
Since the poll-taker immediately has to skip question numbers 14 through 45 or 46 through 80 about 'why do you vote for candidate X regarding this", it's a real timesaver.
It also is the only defense one has against those ubiquitous 'push-polls'.
Posted by: Joe at October 24, 2004 02:49 PMJoe,
You reminded me of my own limited political polling experience...I always felt SOOOO guilty as we were told to let the phone ring forever and then an elderly person would answer and be worried that something was wrong with a loved one...or out of breath from the effort of getting to the phone.
Needless to say, I hated doing it. Which is why the word 'limited' appears in that first sentence above. ;)
I hadn't thought about that in years...
Posted by: Valerie at October 24, 2004 03:01 PMGood for you, Valerie. You were right to step away from it. It's an indignity to have to do that sort of thing.
Between those clowns, and replacement windows, car dealers, and vinyl siding sales calls, I'm ready to get rid of my land line altogether.
Use my answering machine to semi-screen. It cuts off computor dialing. If a human gets thru and starts to leave a message, I pick up. Rarely get nuisance calls.
Posted by: interventor at October 24, 2004 07:11 PMI have this habit of bringing up bad memeories. :-Q
Posted by: Joe at October 25, 2004 01:18 PMSo... if we give up the phone polls, they'l be reduced to harassing people in person. Who wants to bet Kerry's pollers would be staked out in the Hanptons, Martha's Vinyard, and P-Town?
Posted by: Doug at October 25, 2004 02:33 PM
