Skip to main content

Poll Results are Sensitive Things



Here's an oddity worth remembering.

On Saturday evening, February 1, two days before the Iowa caucus, when the actual VOTING phase of this forever campaign was at last set to begin, CNN went on the air in a program it had scheduled in conjunction with the Des Moines Register,  a program that had been promoted as a live unveiling of the final poll results before the actual caucusing. But they provided no results.

The network announced that the pollsters had discovered a glitch in their own procedures that rendered them unwilling to stand by the results. After that announcement, the remainder of the hour-long program was anticlimactic filler.

What kind glitch led to such an embarrassing stand down for these two institutions?  You can find the particulars yourself with a little googling, and I will leave you to it.

I will only say, as I do in the headline above, that poll results these days are sensitive things, best handled with gravest of care....

One of the reasons the oddity is worth remembering is of course that two days later the Iowa Democratic Party decided to sit on all numbers. It said it was getting "inconsistent" numbers from its precincts, so it would release nothing until all was straightened out.

Buttigieg declared victory and moved on. Leaving everybody scratching their heads about what he knew or thought he knew. Perhaps he had guessed right.

When the inconsistencies were eventually straightened out, the bottleneck opened, it turned out he had narrowly defeated Bernie Sanders in the result proper, in terms of delegates earned, though Sanders has bragging rights in terms of raw votes. In much the same way that Hillary Clinton had bragging rights in terms of raw votes in November 2016.

Sensitive matters, indeed. There ought to be some sort of connection between Saturday and Monday.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more