About Those “Rigged New Hampshire Polls” Stories
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Ron PaulSeriously?
Curious about the “wildly inaccurate” polls that put Mr. Obama in a double-digit lead going into Tuesday’s primary, blogger Brad Friedman, a Los Angeles-based election-fraud watchdog, questioned the results as soon as they arrived, and all day Wednesday.“Other folks that I’ve spoken to, who follow this sort of thing, share my concern at this hour,” he wrote on bradblog.com. “If I was Barack Obama, I’d certainly not have conceded this election this quickly. I’m not quite sure what he was thinking.”
Brad, he was thinking that he lost by 3% and there are 48 other states. Not everything is a conspiracy and even Zogby said that the polling from Sunday to Monday was REALLY good for Hillary. Sure, you didn’t know this at the time, but how about waiting until you see some facts before you.
Some Ron Paul supporters were crying foul as well, but in that isolated case they had legitimate concern:
It wasn’t just on the Democratic side: Supporters of Texas Republican U.S. Rep. Ron Paul were pointing to discrepancies in at least one town, where dozens of votes cast were initially counted as zero – before an elections official corrected the error. Mr. Paul’s campaign did not return calls seeking comment.
Done and done. Onto South Carolina and Nevada.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Ron Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
The exit polling basically predicted 39-39, so the final results weren’t far off from what people were saying coming out of the voting locations. I don’t really see election fraud here. The polls simply couldn’t keep up with the shifting situation and there were signs that were missed.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
People need to remember that polls are just a prediction. Just because the polls got it wrong doesn’t mean there was foul play. If you wanna check out a new interesting poll thats happening go to http://www.fittobepres.com... anyone can participate too.
January 10th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
[...] primaries what Florida was to the 2000 general election. But on that front, I have to agree to with Justin Gardner’s conclusion: Get over yourselves, “not everything is a [...]
January 10th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Mark Blumenthal has a very good roundup of the possible explanations for the disparity in the polls and the actual results. I think The Cry helped her out more than people realize. But if anything other than a shift in voter sentiments affected the outcome, it was Clinton’s favorable placement on the ballot (NH moved from ballots with rotating candidate names to fixed ballots this year). Studies show that can account for a 3% boost, at most.
January 10th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
How can one not think of conspiracy theories having just observed an improbably simultaneous media attack on Ron Paul the day of the New Hampshire campaign? A remarkably successful attack that made him plunge from 14% in the polls to an 8% actual vote? After weeks where we heard little about Paul from the mass media and beltway “libertarian” bloggers? TNR from the left, Fox News and talk radio from the right, and piling on from beltway “libertarians” who made a point of loudly repeating the TNR smears and dumping Ron Paul on the day of the primary. Your eyes and ears did not deceive you, all this happened. It is not the result of a criminal conspiracy, but if one uses “conspiracy” as a metaphor for social networks of vast complexity, there is a strong sense in which conspiracy theories accurately, if metaphorically, explain what happened.
The reality behind the conspiratorial metaphor is the social networking between denizens of the Beltway, who sport a wide variety of political labels but are, relative to the rest of the country, a monoculture. I lived there. I went to these parties. These denizens range from the journalists who report the mass media news to various think tank and university scholars at the Cato Institute, George Mason University, and so on. They study Ayn Rand, then marry Andrea Mitchell and testify against tax cuts. Vast amounts of federal money, that stuff that is taken out of your paycheck with such automatic ease, flow into the Beltway area. Directly and indirectly, almost every person who lives in or near the Beltway depends on the very income tax that Ron Paul declared he would abolish — with no replacement!
Many of these paycheck vampires call themselves “libertarians” and inspire us with their libertarian rhetoric to support them with our attention, our blog hits, and our tuition money as well as the tax money that already funds them or their friends. But at the first sign of political incorrectness, all these below-the-Beltway “libertarians” have dumped Ron Paul like yesterday’s garbage. Now they can rest easy that they will still be invited to the parties thrown by their lobbyist and government employee and contractor friends, who for a second or two got worried by all those Google searches that Ron Paul might have some influence, resulting in some of them losing their jobs (end the income tax with no replacement?! The guy is obvioiusly a kook, and we don’t invite the supporters of kooks to our parties!). Now everybody around the Beltway can go back to partying at the taxpayer’s expense. All the money will keep flowing in, hooray!
The lesson millions of young libertarians have now learned from our mass media, including our beltway “libertarians”? Libertarian electioneering is futile. Voting is futile. Democracy is futile. Anybody who actually wants liberty is a kook, as can be proven by their association with kooks. Beltway wonks posing as “libertarians” are happy to write things to inflame your hopes for liberty that they don’t really mean. Then they make sure that we elect the politicians their friends want — the ones that will enslave your future to pay for full social security for Baby Boomers. The ones that will send you off to foreign lands to kill and die. Our Beltway “libertarians” are happy to sell a whole new generation of libertarians down the tubes in order to keep their Beltway friends happy.
January 11th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Done and done? Those are some cold words. Obviously there is something going on when both Paul and Kucinich are both crying foul, considering MSM basically said the discrepancies were due to people at exit polls lying. Lying? What do people have to gain to lie at the exit polls? This is exactly what happened to Dean in NH. This is not done and done.
Please donate to Dennis at http://dennis4president.com and make a memo in the donation field that it’s to be used towards the recount.