Five Reasons Obama Lost

I'm not living in that past tense yet, but I do love their reasons. I'll call it "five reasons Obama oughta lose".

One nit.

There are many Republicans who still remember Democrats stealing the 1960 election with voter fraud in Chicago and Mayor Daley’s expert campaigning in cemeteries to deliver the zombie vote for Kennedy.

Hey! I remember reading about it.

All seriousness aside, I don't think it's all that well known. 2000 and 2004 nonsense fresh enough though.

Good read. Hope they're right.

tip: Nice Deb

Their map projection..

More [ace]: This 1980 article from Time is worth a read -- a "What Happened?" on pollsters calling the Reagan-Carter race "too close to call" up to the day of voting, only to see Reagan win a ten point blow out.

It could be a bit like the current situation -- but in reverse. Perhaps people aren't as confident in the radical socialist Obama as the pollsters think, just as they were never apparently as apprehensive about Reagan as pollsters thought.

Looking for explanations of what went wrong, Wirthlin believes that the other pollsters erred by estimating that there would be more Democrats in the final body of voters than there turned out to be.

What a shock.

Here are the pollsters responding to the one pollster who got it closer to right. This occurs in the context of a debate -- did pollsters have it wrong all along, or did they have it right, but Reagan suddenly got a ten point lead in the 48 hours before the election they didn't poll?

Mitofsky and other pollsters sought to "prove" the latter -- the didn't want to admit they were simply wrong all along. Here is he responding to one pollster who got it closer to right

...

Mitofsky disagrees strenuously with the criticisms. Says he: "I can't buy their approach to making estimates from data. I'm not prepared to throw out our techniques just because one poll produced a different number. In fact, if we were doing this all again, I would not change a single thing except to poll the last two days of the campaign. To believe their figures, too many other people have to be wrong."

Kinda says it all. Mitofsky wouldn't change anything... because hey, they couldn't all have been wrong, could they?

More: Growing Optimism? So it is claimed.

posted by Dave In Texas at 12:04 AM

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