Thursday, January 10, 2008

Liars, Damned Liars And Pollsters

Karl Rove, in a Wall Street Journal article this morning, has this to say about the recent spate of highly inaccurate primary polls:

"The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary. The unpredictability of who will turn out and what the mix of voters will be makes polling a primary election like reading chicken entrails -- ugly, smelly and not very enlightening. Our media culture endows polls -- especially exit polls -- with scientific precision they simply don't have."
I agree; and then the media quickly decides who should and should not be in the race based on those very polls. It certainly seems like wish fulfillment of the Fourth Estate kind.

No comments: