Thursday, November 8, 2012

Podhoretz mans up

Lots of pundits did shoddy work covering the past election. Very few have actually owned up to it.

From NPR:
FOLKENFLIK: But if Florida stays blue, Silver will have picked every state correctly, along with the president's margin of victory. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz of the New York Post and Commentary magazine had earlier argued pollsters were getting it wrong by ignoring the high turnout by Republicans in the 2010 elections that swept the GOP into control of the U.S. House. The 2012 race would be the same, Podhoretz argued, quite mistakenly, as it turned out.

JOHN PODHORETZ: That view was strengthened and amplified by what I wanted to happen, which I freely confess. People don't ordinarily cast a skeptical eye on data and information that supports their opinions. They're happy to take it.

p.s.  Add Unskewed Polls' Dean Chambers to this list.:

“Most of the polls I ‘unskewed’ were based on samples that generally included about five or six or seven percent more Democrats than Republicans, and I doubted and questioned the results of those polls, and then ‘unskewed’ them based on my belief that a nearly equal percentage of Democrats and Republicans would turn out in the actual election this year,” Chambers wrote on The Examiner website. “I was wrong on that assumption and those who predicted a turnout model of five or six percent in favor of Democrats were right. Likewise, the polling numbers they produced going on that assumption turned out to be right and my ‘unskewed’ numbers were off the mark.”

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