Letters to the Editor
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Stop blathering about who is voting, because you don't really know.
"It's a good and noble thing that black voters vote for Obama, unthinkingly. It's an evil racist thing for white voters vote for Hillary unthinkingly."
Um, no.
It's a false exaggeration to claim an entire group is voting for one or the other, let alone unthinkingly.
People keep making these declarations as if they were based in fact, instead specualation based on polls which have proven to have uneven accuracy.
A major media failure is unquestioning acceptance of data without any examination of methodology. Even careful polls may only show a momentary emotion to how a question is worded.
There's increasing evidence major polls are losing accuracy, leaving out cell phone users and other hard to reach groups.
As a column in the New York Times pointed out month ago:
...so many pollsters fail to disclose basic facts about their methods. Very few, for instance, describe how they determine likely voters. Did they select voters based on their self-reported history of voting, their knowledge of voting procedures, their professed intent to vote or interest in the campaign? Did they use actual voting history gleaned from official lists of registered voters?
Fewer still report the percentage of eligible adults that their samples of likely voters are supposed to represent...Incredibly, some organizations routinely report results without any indication of whether a live interviewer or a recorded voice asked the questions.
In California, two pollsters — including the one showing a huge, erroneous lead by Mr. Obama — failed to disclose the demographic characteristics of their samples. Only a handful of pollsters that conduct statewide surveys routinely provide this data...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/opinion/07blumenthal.html
So perhaps you should stop assuming you know WHO is voting and focus on the end results instead.

