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Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Harry Reid wins, public polling be damned

All public polling done for Nevada's Senate race was wrong. Several polls leading up to election showed Sharron Angle beating Harry Reid between 10 and 5 points. Pollsters and poll analyzers will hem and haw and suggest they "underestimated" certain groups of voters, but they were just wrong. Even Nate Silver of 538 fame, who's credited with teaching numbers how to fuck, was WAY off in his forecasting.

I was standing next to Harry Reid during his press conference when he was finally able to say in public that polls for his race were bullshit, and the press still "gobbled" them up. In a twitter back and forth with 8 News Now's Jonathan Humbert, he suggests he "has" to rely on bad polling because "what else do we have to go on?" Uh, how about nothing? Why report on a lie? Your employers spent a lot of money on bullshit polling. You should be apologizing, not making excuses.

Nevada's HPIC Jon Ralston got it right. His Sunday-after column says Reid won because of preparation. The Reid campaign spent the primary cultivating relationships with leaders of constituency groups. Seconds after the primary votes were counted in June, the Reid camp and its allies went live with their anti-Angle websites, Twitter accounts and facebook pages defining the "extreme" granny with a gun from up north before she ever had a chance to define herself.

--
Laura

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