kierthos: (Default)
kierthos ([personal profile] kierthos) wrote2008-01-29 09:38 am

Well, today are Florida's primaries

And while it's tricky to guess which Republican will win it, McCain and Romney being in pretty much a tie, one thing is certain.

It won't be Guiliani.

That is, unless all the polls are wrong. For them to be wrong, the pollsters would either have to have called the completely wrong sample of people every time in the last couple of months and been truly off especially in the last couple of weeks, or the people who are being called are flat out lying.

I really don't think that either possibility is the case. Yes, it is possible to call a number of people for the poll where their responses are not a proper sampling of the population. But these pollsters have been doing this for a while. So I feel reasonable certain that while they might be off by a point or two (or three) here and there, they're not going to be off by the 15 or more points that Romney and McCain have over Guiliani and Huckabee. And while I could see a small group of people working together to lie to pollsters, there's no way to guarentee that they will be the ones called, or that their lies would be statistically significant.

Likewise, the same has to apply to the Democratic race in Florida, which puts Clinton far ahead of Obama and even farther ahead of Edwards. (Edwards needs to drop out after Florida and endorse Obama. But that probably won't happen.) Mind you, some of these polls are from before Obama won South Carolina, and while a few others are after that, they're really before two Kennedys endorsed Obama. So, I'm still seeing a Clinton win in Florida, but not by nearly as much as the polls show.

And of course, delegate-wise, Florida doesn't count for anything for the Democrats. It would be a good PR victory, but that's it.

[identity profile] kierthos.livejournal.com 2008-01-29 04:48 pm (UTC)(link)
Look, I know polls can be off. That's why they have a margin of error. But what I said is that they would either have to wildly off (to the tune of about 20 percentage points, which isn't very damn likely) or the pollsters would have had to continually make giant fuck-ups in their calling patterns. Yes, that's possible too, but not likely.

Now, the polls were off in New Hampshire to the tune of around ten to a dozen points, but they're doing a recount of the votes there anyway. We'll have to wait and see what happens there.