The election is over. I'm not beating a dead donkey. There's been a lot of talk about how wrong the exit polls taken on election day were. And we've heard the pollsters being blamed for picking un-representative samples. We haven't heard what I first suspected on November 2, that maybe what we saw was Terry McAuliffe's successful attempt to influence the polls and, in his mind, the election for John Kerry.
There was, you will recall, some un-representative sampling going on that the pollsters wouldn't discover until later that day when the votes began to be counted. Early that day I recall McAuliffe being interviewed by a cable news reporter and he was looking happy like the cat that had just got the mouse. He didn't act surprised that the exit polls were showing his man in a landslide. Instead, he was just happy, basking in the 'I told you so' light of confidence. Nothing wrong with being positive. But looking back, it could have just as easily been just part of the plan; to spike the polls.
There is a precedent of this sort of behavior from McAuliffe himself. Harken back to the debate season. For all three debates, McAuliffe's DNC mass emailed their lists of supporters asking them to participate in online polls, polls that would be used by all the media the following day.
This time, there seems to be a connection between DNC operatives and the pollsters. Enough of a connection to know which precincts were going to be visited by the national pollsters. It just comes down to look as though McAuliffe had something to do with those un-representative samples.
Best thing the Democrat party can do is purge itself from that guy.
reference DNC letter 10/13/04
4:11:00 PM 
|
