Reply #139: I'll just respond to your points and then [View All]

[Time for change]

suggest how this argument could be settled.

Again, I don't care that much what credentials these people have. Anton Scalia is widely regarded as a brilliant jurist with impeccable credentials, but at the same time his opinion in Bush v. Gore is widely ridiculed by knowledgeable legal scholars as one of the two or three worst Supreme Court decisions in its history. And as far as one of these guys saying that more Florida voters intended to vote for Gore than Bush in 2000, that's a no-brainer and certainly doesn't qualify him as a liberal.

If you don't believe that pre-election polls are designed to predict winners (or rather predict where the race stands at that moment), why on earth do both parties and the media conduct so damn many of them? Do you really think that there is another reason for doing them?

If the reason that Mitofsky hasn't released the raw numbers is because they are meaningless, that certainly doesn't explain why he won't release his own detailed interpretation of the numbers. If his objective was to prevent misinterpretation of his poll, that is exactly what he would do. Anyhow, I didn't exactly say that he was lying. Let's just say that I think that he's evading and "spinning".

I scanned through the link that you provided, and I didn't see what quotes from Mitofsky support your argument that he has been consistent in his pronouncements. If you could point me to a particular page that you think makes that point, that would be helpful.

Anyhow, what I think would at least partially settle this argument would be to see the results of Mitofsky's polls, and their comparison with actual results, since he has been in the business: Presidential polls, Senate, House, Gubernatorial -- I don't know exactly what polls he's done, but I'm sure that there are a considerable number.

I suspect that it would be very difficult if not impossible to get hold of this information, otherwise we would have seen it posted by now. But I think that that information would answer a lot of questions and also make a lot of the other arguments on both sides of the issue trivial by comparison.

So please let me know if you have any idea of how to get this information. I would love to see it.