Monday, January 14, 2008

I think that there is a story that is not getting discussed enough on TV, and it is about politics. I found extremely interesting the major polling malfunction prior to the New Hampshire Primary. Almost every poll had Hillary Clinton losing by at least seven and usually double digits. The Clinton camp itself seemed assured of defeat. Yet, Clinton won by 2 to 3 percentage points. A stunning turn around. What exactly happened? There are several theories.

Rasmussen puts forth several theories. They are the standard theories that more independents went to John McCain and the Republican Primary rather than the Democratic one which hurt Obama. This article also claims that they saw the upswing in support for Hilary in their Monday Night polling where she was only behind by seven rather than double digits. Yet, this is still a massive swing of 9% points in less than 24 hours.

The New York Times prefers to go with the standard story that women came out in droves because of the tears shed by the usually calculating Mrs. Clinton. The Cable news pundits seem to think this is the case as well. However, if this is true it is more of a reason to revoke a woman’s right to vote rather than cheer a political miracle. It paints all women as those who cannot resist a sob story. I know a lot of women who don’t think like that, and so I find this a hard to believe explanation as well.

I have still not yet really found a credible reason for this malfunction of not just one poll, but all major pollsters in America. Every single one. Zogby, Rasmussen, Gallup, and countless more local polls. The best reasons have not been mentioned by major media except in the crawl lines at the bottom of the screen, if then.

One is that anyone can vote in New Hampshire even those who live in Vermont or New York or any place at all. The rules are non-existent and meant to be so. I admit I heard this fact from Rush Limbaugh, but that does not mean it is not true. What makes me wonder why more people are not talking about this factor is that I heard Joe Scarbrough of MSNBC comment on how Hilary Clinton was in big trouble because he attended a rally she held the night before the elections and over half of the cars in the lot were from out of state. That sounded like nice reporting by Joe, but now it turns out all of those people could have stayed around and voted. Did Clinton use a law to here advantage? Did New Hampshire get out voted by Clinton workers from New York? Someone ought to at least ask.

The biggest thing that the news is not covering is the allegations of fraud that were immediate. Not surprisingly Ron Paul supporters started the fury, and have some actually admitted cases of deception under their belt. However, the fury increased when it looked as if those places that used a voting machine or optical vote reader to count the votes favored Hilary and all hand counted placed favored Obama. As one can see this is not a new controversy with these machines or New Hampshire HBO, Lou Dobbs, and You Tube have all talked before about how easy it is to hack into these machines and even shown someone do it. Thus, the silence of the media is amazing. I think it is because it is sparked by bloggers and the media hates bloggers. Thankfully, Congressmen Kucinch asked for a recount and it has been authorized. There are sane reasons out there that this fraud is probably wrong, but I still think it would have gotten more press. Plus, the reason given just leads us back to what happened to make all of the polls so wrong.

At any rate, I am interested to hear how the recount goes. I am surprised that people have not spent more time looking into it. My distrust of government tells me that this could have been rigged. My distrust of pollsters tells me they probably just make stuff up to put in their polls. Over all I would just like to see some real journalism by someone. Somebody ask some real questions, please.

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