Sorry to bring up OxyRush or post to Freak Republic.
On a NON POLITICAL board I've been enjoying cat & mouse games with a dunce who basically tries to discredit every poll that indicates anything he doesn't like by basically saying Polls are meaningless.
His last effort was this link to a Rush rant about polling not being right. Here's a bit of it:
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Well, I look at the internals of this poll and there's only one way this can be happening. Let me go through this for you. The poll out today shows that Bush trails Senator Kerry on a ballot test with Ralph Nader on there by six points, 48-42. You take Nader out, I think, it's Kerry may be at 51 and Bush at 44, something like that, but figure six points here. But, in the same poll, President Bush carries independents 49-46 and Republicans by a 92-4 margin.
Now, wait a second. How does this compute? If Bush carries independents 49-46 and Republicans by 92-4, how does Kerry have a six-point lead? Because in the same poll, Kerry leads among Democrats by 86-7, not 92-4. With Bush carrying independents by three points in this poll, and holding more of his own party than does Kerry, the Times' sample, in order to give Kerry this lead, has to contain far more Democrats than Republicans! It has to be a weighted survey. They have to have talked to a vast majority of Democrats compared to Republicans and independents in this poll. And in this same poll, they also point out there are three battleground states, and one of them is now Ohio, that Bush is doing much better in and Kerry is in trouble.
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It's just a strange, strange, strange story. I mean, it's worth noting that three major studies show partisan identification in the nation more or less evenly split. You know, for example, the Gallup study, 40,000 interviews in 2003 finds a 45.5 to 45.2 Republican-Democrat split, and ABC News study of 22 surveys in 2003 with a thousand or more interviews each find partisan identification evenly split 31-31. This is Democrat-Republican. And the Pew study of its 2003 survey finds Republicans trailing Democrats by one point, 30-31. This is Democrat-Republican, pretty much evenly split in all three of these surveys. Now, what this tells you is conservatives outnumber liberals in terms much how they identify themselves 2-1 right now. It's like 36-18. Only 18-20% of Americans actually have the courage and the guts and the temerity and the fortitude and the gonads to identify themselves as liberal. Only 18-or-20%. So throw out this Democrat-Republican business to a certain extent. But this poll is awfully, awfully suspicious, I shall say
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1151389/postsIt looks to me like Rush is just making things up and then saying the polls are wrong because they don't match what HE says they should be.
But if anyone has a better argument I'd take it!
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