Ralph Nader Takes on Gallup Poll's Black Box

October 5th, 2008
Posted by Toby Heaps at Nader 2008 blog

We do fairly poorly on the Gallup poll, generally registering less than 1 percent (or about 5 times less than the recent WSJ poll). This is probably because they don’t mention Ralph Nader’s name in the question–just Obama and McCain.

So I phoned up Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief (609-924-9600), and asked him if they had any kind of objective threshold which we could strive toward so that Ralph Nader’s name could be included as part of the primary question.

His answer: “No. We use our internal judgment to decide. We do some open-ended questions and variety of other criteria, and then our editorial team makes a decision.” I asked if there were any ballpark levels of support in the open-ended question they looked to as a threshold, and he repeated his mantra, that it was subject to “internal judgment criteria,” and then jumped off to take another call.

He was kind enough to leave me with his e-mail to follow up. Anyone who wants to let Newport know what you think of his internal judegment, please call him or e-mail him at frank_newport@gallup.com."

Thanks to Austin Cassidy's Independent Political Report for bringing this entry to my attention.


Here are a few other articles of interest:

Why does the latest poll by the Pew Research Center report that drilling for domestic oil has jumped to the top of Americans' energy priorities? Maybe because Pew didn’t ask respondents if they want the nation to invest in clean energy and efficient cars, instead. So suggests this poll (pdf) by Belden Russonello & Stewart, released last week.
http://wilderness.org/Library/Documents/upload/BRS-Omnibus-Poll_07-22-08.pdf

Despite a raft of advantages in the electorate for Democrats, in September's first Gallup tracking poll, an equal number of Republicans and Democrats were surveyed (including "leaners") from Sept. 3-5, compared to a 10-point Democratic identification advantage two weeks ago. That partisan makeup of the polling pool resulted in a 5-point lead for McCain in Sept. 5 tracking poll. Meanwhile, the new CBS poll features a 6-point swing in partisan composition toward Republicans, which plays some role in the poll's two-point lead for McCain. Finally, the latest USA Today poll, which claims a four-point edge for McCain, was arrived at after a 10-point swing in partisan makeup toward GOP respondents. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/09/poll-madness-mccain-takes_n_125158.html

Polling itself is unpredictable. Polling affects elections. It's sort of like this thing "you can't drop a stone in the same river once [sic]"—as soon as you poll it, you've changed it. What should we really make of polling in this election? http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=2111

Polling is a business; the interest of pollsters is not to educate the public.

PolitiFact | A service of the Obama Campaign

A few weeks ago I added the Politifact gadgety thingy to my homepage, as I had come across an interesting article and took a few moments to look over a few of their headlines and thought it might be interesting. And in fact they are interesting, the site itself is well laid out, newsy and not extravagant. I've bookmarked a few of their articles, referred to them for info etc. It began to occur to me recently however, that the frequency of the name Obama over Clinton in the 6-7 headlines that come across the little reader was, well, getting more frequent. Over the next few days I kept my eye on those headlines and also began to notice they were leaning a bit to the Obama not Clinton. Questions and controversies from the headlines sure, but picked and parceled so the Clinton questions whether they turn out to be true or half or pants on fire, always seem to end up with Clinton looking bad, and Obama but not Clinton looking put out and wronged. Today I clicked on a headline from the RSS feed, Focus on the Facts I think, another article letting us know someone had maligned Obama, not Mrs Clinton. So I decided to head to their front page to see what that was like.

Obama word count 20
Clinton word count 9

Obama Pictures 7
Clinton Pictures 3

Rezko - 0

Needless to say, I am deleting the gadgety thingy as I don't need this sort of "Truth".


April 26, 2008 Update:

A couple of links to similar stories:

MediaMatters March 08 Why Politifact Really Emerged

Nader Mckinney Gravel Paul Nader Mckinney Gravel Paul Nader Mckinney Gravel Paul