Thoughts on the Election — the Polls

I was going to put together a big post on the results of the election. But could never get it exactly right. So I've decided to break it up into smaller posts. I'll have several of these over the next few days.

The Polls. They were all wrong. At least that’s what the Republicans said and all the conservative pundits and Fox News said. All the polls were wrong. The polls were over sampling Democrats. Democrats, according to these conservative voices, would in no way turn out in the numbers they did four years ago for Obama. The Romney campaign believed this too. But it turns out the polls were right. Most showed Obama winning, narrowly, but still winning.

How did they not see this? Well conservative group think is part of it. The fact that in general they just don't disagree with Obama they despise him. They see him as not being legitimate. Thus the birther and all the other conspiracy theories as to how and why he is president. It could not possibly be that people actually support him.

Being off on the polls was embarrassing to the conservative punditry but it was fatal to the Romney campaign. It makes you wonder why just one of the people in the campaign didn't say you know maybe our model isn't right because no else seems to be agreeing with us.

Then there was the conservative reaction to those organizations and people who said Obama was going to win. I can understand challenging the sampling make up of the polls. Stating that your over sampling Democrats and that's skewing the results. But they didn't stop there. They then attacked the people specifically Nate Silver as biased towards Democrats. Some went even further, this from conservative blogger and poller Dean Chambers:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the "Mr. New Castrati" voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he's made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

What has this to do at all with the accuracy of how the polls are set up and who's going to win. Once again people taking positions not in line with conservatives are personally attacked.

And Republians wonder why they lost the election.