As Pinkerton Was to McClellan

so the various polling agencies are to the news show biz.

In 1862 George McClellan was in command of the Army of the Potamac. This force, largely organized and trained by Gen. McClellan personally, numbered some 87,000 when it marched to face Lee's Army of Northern Virgina in September of that year.

McClellan, ever the cautious general, was convinced that his enemy outnumbered him by perhaps 2 or 3 to one, and asked his spy service, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, to reconnoiter. Certainly enough, the Pinkerton agents confirmed Gen. McClellan's assessment. Of course, the Pinkertons understood, that to tell Gen. McClellan that his enemy, in truth, numbered only 40,000 would have brought them a rubuke and probably cost them their jobs, so they told him what they believed he wanted to hear.

Modern polling agencies are no different. In this case their masters are not generals, but the various agencies of the news show biz. It is no wonder that the polls reflect an evenly divided electorate. The news show biz has been insisting that it is so for 4 years now.

Polling is not a matter of asking a set number of people the same questions and recording the responses. That is one step in the process, but those "raw" numbers are never what comes out the back end [pun intended]. Instead the polling agencies use elaborate sampling models to determine which of the respondents to count as part of a "representative sample". Now, there is good reason to use such models, but the devil is as always in the details. Like any proprietary system of data reduction, such models are subject to abuse. In this case, if your master insists vehemently that the electorate is divided exactly evenly then by George you'd better make sure your model produces that outcome.

The trouble is that there is ample evidence that this conclusion may be false. Most importantly is the outcome of the mid-term elections of 2002. As you may recall, the news agencies were quite certain that the inevitable march of history told us that the President's party loses ground in the midterm elections. All the polls we were shown seemed to confirm this idea. Unfortunately, the voters seem to have missed that memo because they handed the President's party a set of huge victories in 2002.

It didn't take long for the news show biz to forget about that and go back to the story they had previously written that the electorate was deeply and evenly divided. They've been telling this story, over and over for another 2 years since. As for the 2002 election not following the narrative: "Nothing to see here. Move along." They had the story they wanted to tell, and they've stuck to it. Their dutiful lackies, the polling agencies, seem to have fed them the numbers they wanted, just as the Pinkertons did to McClellan. When the battle is at last joined, we shall see.