{"id":28086,"date":"2008-01-09T01:01:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T04:25:13","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-05-19T04:25:13","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T04:25:13","slug":"drive_by_pollsters_face_crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2008\/01\/09\/drive_by_pollsters_face_crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Drive-By Pollsters Face Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

RUSH: I mentioned at the beginning of the program a number of things to explain what happened on the Democrat side in the polling, the pre-election polling versus the outcome last night. I want to repeat a couple things. I\u2019ve got this piece by the pooh-bah of polling at ABC. His name is Gary Langer, and one thing that I need emphasize: This was so off-the-charts wrong. All of these polls. I think there were a couple of exceptions, but all the big-time polls, as you know, had it Obama up by five to ten, some cases 12 points. Now, they got the Republican race fairly close, but they really blew the Democrat side. These pollsters, their reputations are crucial to them. Polling is such a fundamental element of the Drive-By Media these days, because polling is used to make news. Polling is used to shape public opinion. Polling is not a reflection of news. This is the thing that a lot of people don\u2019t understand, but it is not meant to tell you, ‘Hey, this is what people are thinking.\u2019 The purpose of polls — be it pre-election polls or Iraq war polls — those polls are being used by the Drive-Bys as a substitute for news, and the purpose is to shape your thinking and your opinion, and if they continue to botch these things, nobody\u2019s going to pay attention to them. <\/p>\n

Now, frankly, I have a fantasy. Wouldn\u2019t it be just fun, wouldn\u2019t it be fascinating if there were no polls, no pre-election polls whatsoever? Stop and think for a moment. It will never happen, I know, but stop and think if every election, primary or general, had no polling in it, and you had no idea what your neighbors were thinking unless you asked them, but you couldn\u2019t talk to everybody in the state. If you lived in New Hampshire, you couldn\u2019t talk to everybody to find out what was going to happen. All you could do is talk to your friends and some of your neighbors. You wouldn\u2019t have the slightest idea. It would be totally up to you and what you think: not joining the crowd, not opposing the crowd. It would be totally up to you. I think it would be fascinating. It\u2019s a fantasy of mine. It will never happen, but these pollsters are going to have to get to the bottom of this. They are going to have to find out what went wrong and caused their polls to be so skewed. They\u2019re going to have to go about this in a purely objective way, and then if they have guts, they\u2019re going to have to tell us what they found. <\/p>\n

I suspect that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to break down. I suspect that they\u2019ll do their investigation; they will find out what happened, but they will avoid announcing the details because ‘to do so would skew people\u2019s thinking about polls in the future, wondering if it were happening again.\u2019 So they will tell us with confidence and assuredness that they have found out what went wrong, but we will not be told what it was. We will just have to take their word for it. Now, what put me on to this was reading this piece by the ABC polling pooh-bah last night that ABC posted on its own blog. His name is Gary Langer, and he\u2019s ‘covered the beat of public opinion for more than 15 years.\u2019 Here\u2019s how he began his piece last night. It was posted just after midnight. ‘There will be a serious critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democrat presidential primary in New Hampshire. That is essential. It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong. We need to know why. But we need to know it through careful, empirically based analysis. There will be a lot of claims about what happened, about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests,\u2019 and that\u2019s the only reference to that that he makes: ‘about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests.\u2019 <\/p>\n

Can I explain what this means to you, ladies and gentlemen? It\u2019s called the Wilder Effect. In other places, it\u2019s called the Bradley Effect. In still other places, it\u2019s called the Dinkins Effect. But here\u2019s how it works. You have on a ballot a black candidate and a white candidate. A pollster calls and asks you who you\u2019re going to vote for. You, in the privacy of your phone call with the pollster, not wanting the pollster to think that you\u2019re a racist pig, likely would say, ‘I\u2019m voting for the black guy,\u2019 so as to get the pollster\u2019s approval, whether the pollster actually grants it or not. (You know, the tenets of political correctness.) But then, when you go into your polling place, and you go into the place behind the curtain where it\u2019s just you, and there\u2019s no pollster, you vote for the white guy, thereby skewing the results of the pre-election poll. Now, I would also like to add to this hypothesis what I would call the Reverse Wilder Effect. Wilder, by the way, being Doug Wilder, the governor of Virginia who was black, and about whom it was first postulated; and Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, running for governor out there; and Dinkins. Now keep in mind all these guys are Democrats and you\u2019re dealing with Democrats being called by the pollsters. So if you call up your Democrat and say, ‘Hi, I\u2019m from the ABC Polling Unit. Who you gonna vote for?\u2019<\/p>\n

‘I\u2019m voting the black guy, I\u2019m voting a good America. I\u2019m not racist: I\u2019m voting the black guy. I\u2019m open-minded! It\u2019s time for a change.\u2019 <\/p>\n

‘Oh, good! I\u2019ll put it down.\u2019<\/p>\n

You go to the ballot box, and you vote the white guy, where nobody can see what you\u2019re doing and nobody will know what you\u2019re doing. But Iowa, the Hawkeye Cauci? You go into somebody\u2019s house; you go into some gymnasium, some school cafeteria, and you got all your friends knowing what you\u2019re doing. You have all your friends watching what you\u2019re doing, and so when it comes to time to vote in the Hawkeye Cauci on the Democrat side, in order that your friends don\u2019t think you a racist, you vote Obama, because you can\u2019t vote in private in the Hawkeye Cauci. This would be the Reverse Wilder Effect. So who knows if we\u2019ve got an accurate result out of Iowa. You know, I mention all this because, again, we\u2019re talking Democrats. We\u2019re talking Democrats who are immersed in political correctness and who live and die based on what people think of them, and the voting booth is the only place nobody will know what you\u2019ve done, unless you tell them. So there\u2019s no worry what people will think of you. But in the Hawkeye Cauci, when everybody can hear what you say, or read what you vote or can hear you advocating or whatever? Well, you might have skewed Obama\u2019s big victory in Iowa. Who knows? Then you get on to New Hampshire, and, of course, the Obama Effect here, or the Wilder Effect in full force in the sense that when it\u2019s time to go vote, you do so in private.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve told the pollsters, ‘Obama! Obama! I am caught up in the Obama wave coming out of Iowa,\u2019 and so forth. Then you get into the voting booth and say, ‘Screw it! I\u2019m voting Hillary.\u2019 You couple that with who knows what other kinds of shenanigans went on with people first-time voting in New Hampshire yesterday. I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s a way of finding that out, but it\u2019s probably not difficult to do if they would release those kinds of statistics. (interruption) Yeah, but did it happen. The secretary of state said yesterday — and, of course, this is the day before — said the ballots supposedly ran out. But the New Hampshire secretary of state said they\u2019re expecting records numbers of first-time voters, which means (laughter) out-of-state people. It\u2019s not illegal in New Hampshire, as we have documented. Regardless what happened, pollsters are going to have to find out: for their own good, for their own understanding. I\u2019ve heard some pollsters last night saying, ‘Well, you know what, we\u2019ve got a problem with our models. We haven\u2019t found a way to calculate this massive turnout that\u2019s surprising everybody,\u2019 meaning: We haven\u2019t figured out a way to go into Massachusetts and Vermont and ask people there how they\u2019re going to vote in the New Hampshire primary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: I mentioned at the beginning of the program a number of things to explain what happened on the Democrat side in the polling, the pre-election polling versus the outcome last night. I want to repeat a couple things. I\u2019ve got this piece by the pooh-bah of polling at ABC. His name is Gary Langer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nDrive-By Pollsters Face Crisis - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2008\/01\/09\/drive_by_pollsters_face_crisis\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Drive-By Pollsters Face Crisis - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: I mentioned at the beginning of the program a number of things to explain what happened on the Democrat side in the polling, the pre-election polling versus the outcome last night. 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