|
The Hill
Dems: Don’t
trust the polls
By Niall Stanage
10/13/14
Democrats have a new message in the 2014 race for the Senate: Don’t
trust the polls.
The party is stoking skepticism in the final stretch of the midterm
campaign, providing a mirror image of conservative complaints in 2012
about “skewed” polls in the presidential race between President Obama
and Republican Mitt Romney.
Democrats who do not want their party faithful to lose hope —
particularly in a midterm election that will be largely decided on
voter turnout — are taking aim at the pollsters, arguing that they are
underestimating the party’s chances in November.
Two years ago, Silver took heat from Republicans like MSNBC’s Joe
Scarborough for writing that Obama had a 73.6 percent chance of winning
the White House.
This year, Democrats have been upset with Silver’s predictions that
Republicans are likely to retake the Senate. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp
(D-N.D.) mocked Silver at a fundraising luncheon in Seattle that was
also addressed by Vice President Biden, according to a White House pool
report on Thursday.
More generally, Democratic strategist Brent Budowsky, a columnist for
The Hill, recently wrote that, “There are so many razor-thin Senate
races that confident predictions of which party holds Senate control
are, to paraphrase a line from Jack Nicholson in ‘Chinatown’, wind from
a duck’s derriere.”
“Polling has become politicized like everything else in the current
environment,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a Boston University professor who
specializes in political communication. “The press has become more
politicized, the reporting itself has become more politicized and so it
is to be expected that polling is politicized.”
Even President Clinton has suggested that the pollsters are getting it
wrong, both in terms of the likely results and the assumptions that
their projections are based upon.
Speaking in his native Arkansas on Tuesday, Clinton noted that the
polls were not encouraging for Democrats but added that those findings
were based on projections that young people would not turn out in large
numbers...
Read the rest of the article at The Hill
|
|
|
|
