BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
In defense of polls. There's
been a lot of talk since Iowa about how the polls were supposedly all
wrong. In fact, they got it exactly right. How they're used is
another matter.
Six weeks ago, as we all know, John
Kerry's presidential campaign was dead in the water. As Dan Aykroyd's
Bob Dole would say, he knew it, we knew it, and the American people
knew it. Fundraising dried up. He poured his personal money into the
campaign in a desperate attempt to stave off collapse. It got so bad
that in New Hampshire, which is close to a must-win state for him,
the alternative to Howard Dean increasingly came to be seen not as
Kerry but as Wesley Clark.
Now, what if Kerry had ignored the
polls? Guess what: he'd be limping into the final week of his
campaign. Instead, he shook up his campaign staff. He sharpened his
stump speech. And - most important - he pulled up stakes in New
Hampshire in favor of running full-time in Iowa during the last few
weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
As we now know, Kerry's
all-or-nothing gamble on Iowa paid off. But it's not as if no one saw
it coming. Several weeks ago the media - including national papers
such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times
- reported that Kerry appeared to be doing a much better job of
connecting with ordinary voters in Iowa.
Then, about a week and a half
before the caucuses, the Zogby
daily tracking polls began
to show movement: Kerry and John Edwards up; Dean and Dick Gephardt
down. By last Wednesday, with a week to go, Kerry had taken a narrow
lead. The last Zogby poll, as well as the Des Moines
Register's weekend
poll, foresaw the exact
order of finish, although not the dramatic margin of Kerry's and
Edwards's final tallies.
In other words, it appears that the
polls were an accurate reflection of what was happening on any given
day. The polls were immensely useful to the Kerry campaign. Where the
pundits blew it was in taking those polls and using them to predict
what would happen two or more months out. But even here I think it
would be wrong to be too harsh. No one has ever come back from
the kind of hole Kerry had dug himself into. His conflicted stance on
Iraq, and his rococo speaking style, hardly seemed like the tools
needed to stage one of the great political comebacks.
And by the way: according to the
American Research Group's daily
tracking polls in New Hampshire,
Kerry's Iowa bounce is for real. The latest numbers show Dean still
leading, with 26 percent; Kerry with 24 percent; and Clark at 18
percent, dropping out of the virtual tie he had been in with Kerry.
Zogby
has it Dean, 25; Kerry, 23; and Clark, 16.
I'm willing to bet if the primary
were held today, the results would reflect those numbers. But next
Tuesday? Well, we'll just have to wait and see.
posted at 12:14 PM |
|
link
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
