Shot in the Dark

Category: The Great Poll Scam

  • Chanting Points Memo: Camouflaging The Battleground

    The Strib “Minnesota Poll” is doing what it’s paid to do:  create a pro-DFL bandwagon effect, and suppress GOP voter turnout.  It’s calling Minnesota at Obama with 48% and Romney with 40%. But the poll uses the same absurd D41/R28 breakdown that the Marriage and Voter ID polls.  This polling would have you believe that…

  • Chanting Points Memo: “Minnesota Poll” Orders Material For A Narrative-Building Spree

    If you take the history of the Minnesota Poll as any indication, yesterday’s numbers on the Marriage Amendment might be encouraging for amendment supporters: The increasingly costly and bitter fight over a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is a statistical dead heat, according to a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll. Six weeks before Election…

  • The Bandwagoneers

    Have you noticed something? No “Minnesota Poll” yet this cycle.  Ditto the Humprey Institute. Usually by this point in an election cycle, they’ve run a poll showing the Republican candidate down by some absurd amount that turns out to be many times greater than the eventual margin of victory (or defeat) for the DFLer. Now,…

  • All That’s Silver Does Not Glitter

    While the national polls show the presidential race a statistical toss-up, Nate Silver points out that polls conducted in swing state show Obama with an actual lead of sorts – around three points:. While that isn’t an enormous difference in an absolute sense, it is a consequential one. A one- or two-point lead for Mr.…

  • Where Used Car Salespeople Fear To Tread

    Say what you will about the Minnesota Poll and the Hubert H. Humphrey poll.  As bad, inaccurate, DFL-biased and seemingly-rigged as both are, they both actually release their cross tabs – such as they are. So far. With the WaPo’s new practice of sitting on the data for their polls – which, naturally, show that Barack Obama…

  • He’s Baaaaaack

    The lefties were all atwitter yesterday over a poll in the MinnPost that purported to show that Minnesotans blame the Minnesota GOP for the shutdown: By a whopping 2-1 margin, Minnesotans blame the Republicans who control both houses of the Legislature for the recent government shutdown more than they blame Gov. Mark Dayton, according to…

  • Fearless Predictions

    I have a couple of predictions for you. Prediction 1:  Polled To Death – Take this to the bank:  sometime before July 1, the Strib will run another “Minnesota Poll” in re the shutdown. The poll’s headlines will be within one rhetorical standard deviation of  “65% of Minnesotans Favor Compromise On Budget Impasse”. The crosstabs,…

  • Strib Poll: Empowering The Powerful, Gulling The Gullible

    The poll was as drearily predictable as the annual stadium extortion-fest; notwithstanding last November’s electoral GOP legislative sweep, yet another Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” shows that the public is, mirabile dictu, entirely on board with the DFL agenda: Sixty-three percent of respondents said they favor a blend of higher taxes and service reductions to tackle the…

  • Trump, The Media, and Bandwagons

    For background, I’ll refer you to…: The Huckabee Corollary the McCain Corolloary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: The Republican that the media covers most intensively before the nomination for any office will be the one that the liberals know they have the best chance of beating after the nomination, and/or will most cripple the GOP if…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part XIV: Fool Me Ten Times…

    You’ve heard the old saying – “the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  The joke writes itself.  Nearly every election season, Minnesota’s media runs the results of the Star-Tribune Minnesota Poll and the Humprey Institute/MPR Poll on its front pages; front and center on…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part XIII: Reality Swings And Misses

    Contrary to the impression some wrote about on various blogs, I never worked for the Emmer campaign.  Oh, I did a fair amount of writing about Emmer’s bid for governor – I thought he had what it took to be the best governor we’ve had in a long time, and I was a supporter from…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part XII: The Dog Ate Their Homework

    Writing in defense of the Humphrey Institute Poll – which indicated our tie governor’s race was headed for a 12 point blowout – Professor Larry Jacobs says: Careful review of polls in the field conducting interviews during the same period indicates that the MPR/HHH estimate for Emmer (see Figure 2) was within the margin of…

  • The Great Poll Scam Part XI: Weasels Rip My Results

    Professor Larry Jacobs – by far the most-quoted non-elected person in Minnesota – defends the Humphrey Institute Poll: Differences between polls may not be substantively significant as illustrated by the case of MinnPost’s poll with St. Cloud State, which showed Dayton with a 10 point lead, and the MPR/HHH poll, which reported a 12 point…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part X: Weasel Words

    I’ve been raising kids for a long time.  Before that, I grew up around a bunch of them.  Indeed, I was one myself, once. And I know now as I knew then the same thing that every single person who watches Cops knows, instinctively; if you think someone did something, and their response is “you…

  • The Great Poll Scam Part IX: The Rockstar Who Couldn’t See His Face In The Mirror

    In reading Professor Larry Jacobs’ defense of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute poll – which always underpolls Republicans in its immediate pre-election survey, by an average of six points, with the tendency even more exaggerated in close races – Jacobs writes (with emphasis added): Appropriately interpreting Minnesota polls as a snapshot is especially important because…

  • The Great Poll Scam Part VIII: Snapshots That Never Come Into Focus

    I was reading Larry Jacobs’ defense of the Humphrey Institute’s shoddy work this past election. His first point in defense is that polls are “a snapshot in time”: Polls do not offer a “prediction” about which candidate “will” win. Polls are only a snapshot of one point in time. The science of survey research rests…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part VII: Post Mortem

    The Twin Cities’ media and academic establishment is starting to try to unpack the disaster of their polling efforts this past election cycle. Minnesota Public Radio has done us the service of printing both the Humphrey Institute’s Larry Jacobs’ defense of the Humphrey Institute poll and a counter from Frank Newport of Gallup Polling. And David…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part VI: The Hay They Make

    We’ve been discussing the MPR/Humphrey Institute and Minnesota polls for the past two weeks.  Indeed, it’s been one of the ongoing “go to” subjects of this blog for almost eight years now. Why? Because while  the polls themselves are risible, they have an effect on elections in Minnesota. Part of it is in terms of…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part V: Close Shaves

    It’s almost become a cliche, among conservative observers of Minnesota elections.  You’re supporting a Republican.  You know the race is close.  You can feel the race is close. And the final Humprhey and Minnesota polls come out, and the DFLer leads by an utterly absurd margin – like this year’s Humphrey Institute Poll, which showed…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part IV: Hubert, You Magnificent Bastard, I Read Your Numbers!

    The Hubert H. Humphrey Institute is a combination public-policy study program and think tank at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.  Named for the patriarch of the Democratic Farmer-Labor party – a forties-era amalgamation of traditional Democrats and neo-wobbly Farmer-Labor Union members whose Stalinist elements Humphrey famously purged in the mid-forties – the institution serves…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part III: Daves, Goliath

    Rob Daves took over the Minnesota Poll in 1987. I have never met Rob Daves.  Either, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone else.  I don’t know that his alt-media bete noir, Scott Johnson, has even met him, despite not a few requests for interviews. I have no idea what Rob Daves thinks, believes,…

  • The Great Poll Scam, Part II: Polling Minnesota

    My interest in the Minnesota Poll as an individual institution started right about the time I started this blog, six or eight years ago. Now bear in mind that I, Mitch Berg, have made skepticism of the media at least a hobby, if not a fringey living, since 1986.  I have believed that the media…

  • The Great Poll Scam: Introduction

    The weekend before the election, I was talking with a friend – a woman who has become a newly-minted conservative in the past two years.  She’d sat out the 2008 election, and had voted for Kerry in ’04, but finally became alarmed about the state of this nation’s future – she’s got kids – and…

  • Chanting Points Memo: Garbage In, Garbage Out

    Mark Dayton has run one of the single dumbest campaigns in Minnesota history. Dayton himself has been a virtual non-entity, relying on the Twin Cities’ media’s inability and/or unwillingness to question him on  his background, the immense gaps in his budget “plan”, his history of erratic behavior…anything. His surrogates have been another matter entirely; “Alliance…