{"id":1115,"date":"2006-06-13T03:47:32","date_gmt":"2006-06-13T03:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:47","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:47","slug":"chutzpahs_poste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1115","title":{"rendered":"Chutzpah’s Poster Boy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chutzpah<\/b> is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad. The word derives from the Yiddish khutspeh<\/u>…<\/p>\n

\n(from Wikipedia<\/a>)<\/i><\/p>\n

So I’ve been following the diminishing aftershocks from RFK Jr.s pathetic swing and whiff on voting at Rolling Stone<\/a> (my original dismissive comments on his efforts are here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Now please note that I believe that electoral integrity is critically important, and at risk. I don’t believe that recent elections are significantly more at risk than elections have been here in the US (in, say Chicago or other machine cities), but they are more at risk than is acceptable and that needs to change.<\/b><\/p>\n

But my argument keeps getting undercut by these clowns.<\/p>\n

Now I get led over to Salon (where I launch a lame Flash ad while checking my son’s homework), in order to read a defense of Jr’s claims by Steven Freeman<\/a>, who authored a book that – Freeman claims – supports Kennedy’s claims.<\/p>\n

I hope like hell his book does a better job than his Salon piece, though – but I doubt it.
\nHere’s Salon:<\/p>\n

Are exit polls usually accurate?<\/b><\/p>\n

\nYes, they are. On Nov. 2, 2004, Manjoo’s source Mark Blumenthal, the Mystery Pollster<\/a>, had this to say: “I have always been a fan of exit polls. Despite the occasional controversies, exit polls remain among the most sophisticated and reliable political surveys available.” Properly done exit polls are highly accurate. Given the large sample size in U.S. exit polls, they ought to be accurate within 1 to 2 percentage points of the official count. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have nasty habit of actually clicking on the links people put in their web writing. So I click on over to Blumenthal, and read a post that opens with this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Is RFK, Jr. Right About Exit Polls? – Part I<\/b><\/p>\n

\nLate last week, Rolling Stone published an article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. that asks provocatively, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” While it covers many topics involving alleged suppression and fraud in Ohio, the article disappoints in its discussion of the exit poll controversy, because on that aspect of the controversy Kennedy manages to dredge up nearly every long-ago discredited distortion or half-truth on this subject without any acknowledgement of contrary arguments or the weaknesses in his argument. It is as if the exit poll debate of the last eighteen months never happened. With this two-part post, I want to review the article’s discussion of the exit poll controversy in-depth, for it provides a good opportunity to learn something about what exit polls can tell us — and mostly what they cannot — about whether fraud was committed in the 2004 elections. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But then goes on to say this:<\/p>\n

And yes, if you look back at my first post on exit polls on Election Day 2004, I too described exit polls as “among the most sophisticated and reliable political surveys available.”<\/p>\n

\nHowever, I have certainly learned a great deal about exit polls since then, and calling them the “most reliable” of surveys ignores a host of other practical challenges<\/b>. Exit polls generally sample a larger number of voters than telephone polls, but they do so because the “cluster sample” technique used on exit polls– which first selects sample precincts and then voters at those precincts — has more sampling error than comparably sized telephone poll samples. Exit polls also miss the growing number that vote by mail or cast absentee ballots. <\/p>\n

\n[emphasis added]<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and this…<\/p>\n

…one of the most blatant omissions from the Kennedy article: U.S. exit polls have been wrong before. In fact, according to the Edison-Mitofsky report, they have shown a consistent discrepancy favoring the Democrats in every presidential election since 1988. And while the 2004 discrepancy was the highest ever, they were almost as far off in 1992. More specifically, the “within precinct error” (WPE) reported by Edison-Mitofsky showed differences favoring the Democrat of 2.2 points on the margin in 1988, 5.0 in 1992, 2.2 in 1996, 1.8 in 2000 and 6.5 in 2004 (see p. 34).<\/p>\n

\nGo back and watch the classic political documentary, The War Room — or easier, go back and read my post from January 2005 — and you will see that that leaked exit polls on Election Day 1992 provided as distorted a view as those leaked in 2004. The difference was that the leaked exit polls in 1992 were known mostly to insiders and served to exaggerate the size of Bill Clinton’s eventual victory. Clinton won by less than those early exit polls suggested, but he still won the election, so there was little lingering outrage. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So – our intrepid author has – I can’t even use the work Dowdified or cherrypicked – done what generations of movie publicists have done – and simply edited a useful quote out of a review which says quite the opposite. Blumenthal – a professional pollster – clearly set out in his piece an argument for why the exit polls a) were not as wrong as RFK claimed; b) showed error that was not atypical for U.S. elections; and c) were not as accurate in the German elections as claimed.<\/p>\n

At that point, I stopped reading the Salon piece – it’s dinner time – and I’m not sure I’ll finish. The staggering dishonesty of his quote has left me thinking that this is not the best way to spend my time.<\/p>\n

Note that he’ll probably turn this into “Armed Liberal says: ‘…this is…the best way to spend my time.'”<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

He’s just an ellipsis away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Salon, Steven Freeman tries to defend RFK Jr., and fails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}