Gallup Is An Unfunny Joke

It's come to this. Gallup, for no reason that it cares to disclose, and for no reason concordant with any available data, hugely oversamples Republicans in its polls. Since giving the Republicans a 7 point advantage in the likely voter sample of their September 13-15 survey apparently wasn't enough, they decided to give the Republicans a 12 point advantage in their September 24-26 survery. Interestingly, the Bush lead narrows in the second survey, despite a totally inexplicable spike in Republican voter identification.

Let's say it together now. Gallup is no longer a credible polling organization. Their results should not be taken seriously. Their methodology is fatally flawed. For more on this, read Ruy Teixeira here, here, here, and here. (Incidentally, Mickey Kaus, who still doesn't have perma-links, is way out of his depth here. And he should be smart enough to realize that the Republican convention wouldn't have produced a greater shift in voter ID realignment than 9/11 did.)

Matt Yglesias thinks that complaining about Gallup is a form of cocooning, and a distraction from the real problem of Bush's being ahead. I have no doubt that Bush is indeed ahead right now by a small margin, nor that some Democratic partisans are likely to interpret the issues with Gallup as proof that their guy is really in the lead.

But Gallup, unfortunately is not a distraction. Polls are not just measures of the electoral mood; they are factors affecting the electoral mood, and polls showing massive Bush leads, even when they are fabricated, can potentially produce a bandwagon effect [because the voters are stupid--ed.]. Nor is Gallup just another polling firm. It is the token that denotes the type. It retains the reputation of the gold standard, even though it is methodologically decades behind other polls. CNN and USA Today attached their names to the Gallup poll because of its weighty imprimatur. Now, the reputation of CNN and USA Today is at stake in their obstinate, blinkered support of the Gallup results.

Would it be a mistake for any wing of the official Democratic party apparatus to attack Gallup? Absolutely. Is it vitally important that those of us who are unofficial expose the fraudulence of the Gallup results so that they do not become self-fulfilling prophecies? Of course. What are our chances of success? It's hard to say, but I'm optimistic, since we got Luntz canned.