Bothered by the polls that all show G.W. Bush leading John F. Kerry in double digits? Not to worry, says Kim Gandy, president of our very favorite National Organization for Women. The polls are lying! They’re under-sampling! They’re not contacting young folks with cell-phones–who could mean gatrillions of votes for Kerry! Here’s Kim:
“Don’t let polls or commentators or spin-doctors discourage you, demoralize you, or distract you by making you think the battle’s lost. It ain’t over till the fat cats sing, and I for one can’t wait to hear Karl Rove in a high-pitched squeal.”
Kim says the famous Gallup poll of Sept. 13-15 undersampled Democrats–because more Dems vote than Republicans. That means, says Kim, that whenever you run an election poll, you’re supposed to give the Dem respondents a kind of “handicap”–an affirmative-action boost so to speak–by jacking up the Kerry figures in your poll results. Uh-huh.
Here’s more from Kim on why we shouldn’t trust polls:
“Some of the errors include: undersampling young and low-income voters (who are hard to reach by telephone to answer poll questions); only polling ‘likely voters’ and therefore ignoring the hundreds of thousands of new voters who are signing up in droves even as you read this column; and using telephone polling companies that do not call cell-phone users. This means that the millions of (overwhelmingly young) people who use cellphones as their primary phones are not represented (or under-represented) in the polls.
“So here is a recipe for bias: Undersample Democrats, young people, immigrants, first-time voters and people who move often, and oversample Republicans, ignore the other data, and claim victory! Why not? Loudly claiming victory early and often worked well enough in the 2000 election. In the absence of opposition, power belongs to those who grab it.”
I thought pollsters were trying to claim accuracy, not “victory.” At any rate, Kim’s hoping that maybe a lot of people who don’t usually vote–low-income folks and the like–will show up the voting booth come Nov. 2 and turn things around:
“There is a tidal wave of the disaffected’young people, peace activists, low-income women who usually don’t vote, immigrants whose rights have been trampled on. They are taking the first step, they are signing up.
“Now let’s help get them to the polls!”
So expect VW-busloads of disaffected peace activists–those would be the folks with the silvery ponytails and those funny-looking circular medallions on leather cords around their necks–to be joining you at the ballot box on Election Tuesday. I hope for Kim Gandy’s sake that there are zillions and zillions of them out there. Else the poor lady’s eardrums will be rattled by those victory high C’s from diva Karl Rove.