There they go again: CBS-ing the polling data by the Pew Center to produce, voila, the Kerry Bounce!
John Kerry did not get a bounce from the Democratic National Convention. George Bush got a dramatic bounce from the Republican convention, and two polling organizations, for TIME and Newsweek, oversampled among the GOP to give an even more dramatic showing to the President. Thus the news story would develop that Kerry was the Comeback Kid as the polling companies rejiggered the sample.
Not to be outdone, Pew produces a new poll showing a TIE among registered voters and a statistically meaningless Bush lead among likely voters. Gee, how come the Kerry campaign doesn’t act like it’s in a tie with an incumbent. They should be doing cartwheels, right?
I’m sorry to be a broken record, but the polling companies continue to lie to serve their own, or perhaps their chosen candidate’s, interests. Hidden in one graph, and not reported anywhere else in the pages upon pages of the survey is this little sentence at the bottom of the chart:
55% is wishful thinking, of a very particular kind, since 51% voted last time. It is wishful thinking which oversamples non-voters substantially, although we are not provided with enough internal data of the poll to see exactly what is going on.
Ah, but there are clues, indeed, more than clues. Let’s look at just one question in the pdf provided by Pew of poll internals. Asked which candidate can best protect the country from future attacks, Bush bests Kerry 94% to 3% among Republicans, and 59% to 27% among Independents. Even among Democrats, on this issue Bush gets 23% of the vote. Apparently Kerry is getting his numbers inflated because Pew has chosen to oversample morono-Americans.
I know that I should stop analyzing the polls, because it is so frustrating to do so, and serves no useful purpose besides bringing me nearer to needing blood pressure medicine. Yet perhaps there is a purpose. First the NYT fell from credibility, now CBS has been laid waste. Perhaps soon it will be the turn of these revolting exercises in intellectual dishonesty to fall. One can hope.