Poll: 6% of Voters Think Romney Deserves More Credit for Killing Bin Laden than Obama

[ronny]

And, 90% of those are wrong.

 

[uncle money bags]

85% of statistics are made up on the spot.

..... 35% of the time.

 

[LightningCrash]

That's just the tip of the iceberg:

51 percent of Americans apparently think that weather can impact “cloud” computing.

Technically, they're right:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/30/business/la-fi-tn-storm-netflix-instagram-pinterest-20120630

 

[Dave70968]

8% of those voters identifying as liberal voted the same way. I guess that just proves there are ideological nut jobs across the spectrum.

Uncle Money Bags nails it. Now that we have people talking, here's a neat article on the phenomenon:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...s-think-romney-killed-bin-laden-probably-not/

Telling conservatives that there were no WMDs in Iraq made them more likely to say there were weapons, and telling them that the Bush tax cuts reduced revenue made them more likely to say they increased revenue. Same for liberals - while conservatives and moderates were less likely to think Bush banned all stem-cell research after reading an article pointing out that he only banned federal funding of it, liberals’ stated factual beliefs didn’t change at all. So ream after ream of news articles wouldn’t have done much to help any unfortunate souls who formed the belief that Romney killed bin Laden.

Psychologists call the phenomenon on display here “motivated reasoning,” and those of you (which is to say, hopefully all of you) who read Ezra’s New Yorker piece on motivated reasoning and the conservative turn against the individual mandate will be familiar with the idea. But the Romney-killed-bin Laden finding also fits in with the broader literature on polling generally.

Just a little food for thought, not just in analyzing polls, but in our own beliefs.

 

[TerryMiller]

Polls......pffft!!!

Two points to make here:

1. The ONLY poll that matters is the one taken on Election Day when the voters actually vote.

2. See the quote in my signature.

The reason I don't "trust" polls is that most of the time, we have no idea who answered the questions. While the PPP poll did query "likely voters" in Ohio, the pollsters didn't divulge how many of those polled were Democrats, Republicans or Independents/third party.

Why this matters to me is that a lot of polls are taken with a higher percentage of Democrats within the poll. By comparison, if one looks at the Battleground poll (done by a Democrat and a Republican), one of their questions is similar to PPP's poll in that they ask if one considers themselves "Liberal," "Somewhat liberal," "Moderate," "Somewhat conservative," or "Conservative." In Battleground's polls for the last 20 years, the categories of "Conservative" and "Somewhat conservative" makes up about 60% of the respondents. Thus, the U.S. is "generally" center right in political philosophy. (I think PPP's poll also showed more conservatives than liberals.)

So, if the nation is more "center-right," why is it that the pollsters tend to poll more Democrats than Republicans?

 

[LightningCrash]

So, if the nation is more "center-right," why is it that the pollsters tend to poll more Democrats than Republicans?[/SIZE][/FONT]

The Republicans are at work?