Statistics and political polling

I am currently taking a Statistics course and seeing the real world uses everyday. The election polls that we here about over, and over, and over again really seem to use those formulas as much as possible. Ralph K.M. Haurwitz discusses this in his article “the lowdown on higher ed” http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/highereducation/entries/2008/10/28/odds_overwhelmingly_favor_obam.html. He references a UT professor who I’m sure is much smarter than I and has much more data than I could ever hope to look at. He utilizes a software that predicts future events used in investing. The prediction in the data on the web page of the company says there is a 88% chance that Senator Obama will win the election. The professor says the software is incorrect and that actually there is a 99% chance Mr. Obama will win. Basically Professor Love states that because of a bunch of algorithms that rely on random sampling the results are much higher that Mr. Obama will win.
I am more of a common sense kind of guy that looks at people a little more simply. On one hand I can see that a certain percentage of Obama supporters are younger voters that can’t really be polled because they only have a cell phone and no home phones which are used for polling calls. That could make up a huge percentage of votes that can’t really be counted. Along with the normal undecided voters that are unaccounted I can see an X factor that represents many votes for Obama. Lets look at the other side though, Senator McCain has an issue with his own party in that many Republicans don’t have a great feeling about him, his central voting record, and some of his policy stances don’t follow party lines. Those represent many voters that will eventually vote for McCain just to keep Obama out. Also, there are some of the undecided voters that will swing to the McCain side as well. I look at polls a lot like I look at weather forecasting. Many times these things are right, but in the case of polls I think that many, ok most have been wrong. Kerry was going to win in a landslide, McCain had Bush in 2000 by huge numbers, even this year Hillary Clinton was way ahead of Senator Obama through much of the primary. Don’t even get me started on the media and the fact that the only reporting they’ve done in the past two weeks is to report on each other’s polls and what that means. NBC’ references an ABC poll, CNN reports on a CBS poll, and ABC leads their news with a CNN poll that is there “breaking news”!!
Statistics should be focused on real data, that is numbers, populations, sales, dividends, and other real data that doesn’t rely on a human choice which can be overstated, understated, and even lied about. As for me, I think I will move to Fiji and see if I can fire up a coup.

Since when did we belittle citizens to win an election?

This latest round of political propaganda from the Obama and McCain people is the “Joe” discussions. I realize that as far back as the beginning of our country nasty rhetoric against each candidate has been prevalent in our political scenery. Bush-Kerry, Jefferson-Adams, and Lincoln-McClellan to name just a few were ugly name calling campaigns that attempted to destroy the character of the candidate for a few more votes. But my question is when did we allow our political system to attack a citizen for asking a policy question to attempt to understand a candidate’s position. I frankly don’t care which side it came from, we have gotten to a point in our society that we are so power hungry to get into office that we will not stop until some of our citizens are laid across the train tracks. I don’t like either side of the media, the Sean Hannity’s and Keith Olberman’s should not be able to be on national TV spewing their anger. Ed Morrisey writes in his article Obama’s goon squad attempts to destroy Joe the plumber
(http://urbangrounds.com/2008/10/17/obama-vs-joe-the-plumber/) that Obama’s people and the media are trying to destroy Joe’s credibility just from a question the man asked Obama. We as citizens have become numb to this type of TV so much whereas we don’t see this as abnormal, nor do we have the ability to do anything about the situation simply because the whole system now is about the corporate dollar. If we chose the specifically address the sponsors of these networks then something may happen, but to notify the news organizations would yield nothing. I bet if we had some qualified candidates we would see a relevant campaign. As for Morrisey, he defends his argument in the standard conservative way trying to criminalize Obama’s “goon squad” and their efforts in destroying an average citizen. It is sad that our Presidential contest, with two unqualified senators (are these the best two candidates we can really come up with?), have come to a point where the rhetoric will undoubtedly result in a country worse off in four years. Morrisey does his part in continuing the task of ensuring the American citizen blocks out all information and hopes for the best.

BUSH: The movie.

As I was looking through media for material to write on I came across this quasi-article about the new Bush movie. It has bothered me for some reason that there was a movie coming out on Bush ever since I heard Oliver Stone was doing it, I just could not put my finger on why it bothered me. The article in Texas Monthly “Everybody must get Stoned”( http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-10-01/feature2-1.php ) brought up some interesting viewpoints, some that were swirling around in my head and some that were new and engaging. It is an interesting lineup of local Austin people sitting down to review not the movie but the why, when, who, and how the movie should and should not be. These folks discuss whether the movie should have been made now or waited ten years and whether it will help, hurt, or be a non-factor in the upcoming election. My take on the principle of the movie is that it shows a lack of respect, regardless of ideology, to a man that had a few more issues to deal with than any other president except maybe Lincoln or Roosevelt.