Polling As A GOTV Tool PDF Print E-mail
Written by Gary Gross   

Yesterday, I posted about the Strib’s Minnesota Poll. It isn’t surprising that King and Michael talked about the STrib’s poll during the Final Word this afternoon. King mentioned that the new polling company has been around a long time. If King says that they’re a reputable firm, that’s good enough for me. That means I won’t cast aspersions on the polling company.

What I will do, though, is talk about media polls in general because I think that there are different motives for media polls.

If we’re talking about the AP-Ipsos poll, my first assumption is that it’s used to ‘create news’, which is then cited in later stories that follow a desired storyline. That storyline usually is that Democrats are poised to mop the floor with the GOP.

The way that they achieve that storyline is by vastly oversampling Democrats and undersampling Repblicans. Another trademark of the AP-Ipsos poll is that they all but eliminate independents. I recall seeing an AP-Ipsos poll where 47% of the people sampled identified themselves as Democrats, 37% identified themselves as Republicans, with the remaining 16% identifying themselves as independents.

I first noticed the AP-Ipsos polling in 2005, though they’ve been around longer than that. The reason why I noticed them was that they were tanking President Bush’s JA ratings. I didn’t think President Bush was doing a great job by any stretch of the imagination but I didn’t think he’d tanked that bad at that time. That led me to check the sampling.

What I found was that things broke almost perfectly along party identification lines. the net negative JA Rating was almost identical to the party breakdowns.

Later, in 2006, I noticed how frequently dreadful poll numbers got reported. Certainly, people were upset with Republicans for immigration and their loose spending habits. There was no doubt that conservatives were upset with President Bush. Still, I got the impression that the constant drumbeat of dreadful poll after dreadful poll was intended to drive down conservative turnout.

Was it inevitable that GOP turnout would be less in 2006 than in 2002? Definitely. That isn’t the most important question though. This is: Did these polls drive turnout down more than if they hadn’t been reported with that frequency? I can answer with total certainty that the 2006 polls drove down turnout.

The point is this: The various polls show tha the race is over. That’s what they said in August, too.

GOP strategists stuck inside DC’s Beltway say that this might be a worse year for the GOP than 2006. These so-called strategists aren’t getting their information from GOP activists because we’re ready to run through walls for the House GOP caucus and for Sarah Palin.

MSM Effect

In this instance, the MSM I’m referring to isn’t the mainstream media. I’m referring to a new MSM, namely that Message Still Matters.

It’s time we stopped paying attention to the polling. It’s time our candidates started running with a Palin-like confidence. It’s time that we stood for 3 simple principles that Reagan and Goldwater stood for. Those 3 principles are liberty, prosperity and security.

  • If we tell people our vision for achieving longterm prosperity, we’ll appeal to alot of voters.
  • If we explain to voters how our policies translate into greater security, whether we’re talking about national security, retirement security or homeland security, we’ll win lots of elections.
  • If we tell people that our policies must pass the ‘liberty test’, meaning that we won’t pass legislation that limits our freedoms, then we’ll appeal to alot of voters.

These are appealing messages. This summer, I had the opportunity to tell a community leader what I believed. I told this leader that 2006 didn’t have to happen again. I told this leader this:

“It isn’t like the American people suddenly said that they got sick of stable marginal tax rates, that they didn’t suddenly say tha they got sick of seeing their taxes being spent too efficiently, that they didn’t stop saying that they felt too safe against future terrorist attacks.”

Polls matter but message matters more.

Cross-posted at Let Freedom Ring. Comments welcome.