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.

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