Jiggered?

Steve DenBeste returns from hiatus with accusation:

In my opinion, the polls were being deliberately gimmicked, in hopes of helping Kerry. In early August it looks as if there was an attempt to engineer a "post-convention bounce", but it failed and was abandoned after about two weeks. But I'm not absolutely certain about that.

The data for September, however, is clearly an anomaly. The data is much too consistent. Compare the amount of jitter present before September to the data during that month. There's no period before that of comparable length where the data was so stable.

I've been wondering about the major polls for quite some time, the way the oversampling changed over time.

Den Beste has a graph that illustrates his point:

I've circled the part in question.

There's no doubt that the lead has see-sawed over the course of the race. But notice the other changes in leads; the numbers have wavered back and forth with a saw-toothed wave; they've transitioned in a natural flow.

When reading a graph, and you see the abrupt, square-wave changes you see in the circled area, it pretty much inevitably means something has stepped in to alter the normal flow.

That, as I was saying at the time in what I thought was a too-cynical aside, was the major magazines jiggering the polls to set up Kerry for a big rush.

If there's a rational alternate explanation, let's hear it. Note: "It just happened! Get over it!" won't cut it.

Posted by Mitch at October 18, 2004 04:34 AM | TrackBack