Do the Polls Show that the Election is Over and Obama Will be Re-

[Guest]

elected?

by Gary DeMar

The polls don’t look that great for Romney at this time. A couple of polls have Obama up five points. I don’t understand how President Obama’s approval rating is around 42 percent and yet 49 percent of voters say they’re going to vote for him again.

I suspect that there are people who disapprove of Obama and Romney and won’t vote for anybody in November. Some are disenchanted Democrats and Republicans. Of course, there are the Libertarians, followers of Ron Paul, and Constitution Party supporters who most likely did not vote in 2008 so their non-votes don’t mean much since they’ve already been factored in. Or is it out?

I got an email today from someone who’s going to vote for the Constitution Party candidate. Here’s what he wrote:

“I say no to the ‘lesser of two evils.’ I am voting for the Constitution Party and only the Constitution Party. Calling me an idiot does not intimidate me. Romney/Obama [are] all the same to me. Remember the Republican Party was a third party when they put a man in the White House. Let Obama win. Let Romney win. Either way America loses.”

What has the Constitution Party done since it was established in 1991? No seats in the Senate or House of Representatives. No governorships. No state upper houses. No state lower houses. If a third party is going ot be successful, it would help if it had some successes.

Polls can be used to dampen voter enthusiasm. People see a poll showing Obama ahead when the economy is in the toilet and wonder how it’s possible. Why bother voting since the election is over . . . in September!

I wouldn’t be surprised that the poll numbers are being screwed with. There’s just no way to prove it.

A little history might help showing how polls at this point in an election are not necessarily indicators of who’s going to win in November.

Gallup shows that Obama is leading Mitt Romney by 4 points after the DNC Convention. Consider that in the 1980 election Gallup showed that Jimmy Carter was leading Ronald Reagan by 4 points in mid September. In October Carter was up 8 by points. Going into the last two weeks before the election, Gallup published a poll showing Carter up six among likely voters.

Ronald Reagan ended up winning by 9 points and taking 44 states in the electoral count — 489 to 49. Third party candidate John Anderson got 6.6% of the vote and made no impact on the final results.

The most lopsided polling spread after the Democratic National Convention has to be the 1988 election between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. A Gallup Poll had Dukakis up by 17 percent — 55 to 38 percent. A four-point difference is nearly a tie in statistical analysis of polls. It’s within the margin of error. Breitbart reports that The New York Times stated the following from July 26, 1988:

“This was among the findings of a national public opinion poll of 948 registered voters conducted late last week for Newsweek magazine by the Gallup Organization. The telephone interviews took place on July 21, which was the last night of the convention, and on the night after that.

Fifty-five percent of the 948 registered voters interviewed in the poll said they preferred to see Mr. Dukakis win the 1988 Presidential election, while 38 percent said they preferred to see Mr. Bush win.

In the end, the enthusiasm factor will determine who wins. Which party will crawl over broken glass to vote? Let’s hope it’s the Republicans.

http://godfatherpolitics.com/6985/do-the.../#ixzz266pCsQwh

[Dr. Shane]

I think the enthusiasm factor counts more in off-year elections and not so much in presidential elections. Real Clear Politics has an average of all the polls and is normally pretty good. The polls tend to get very accurate a couple weeks before the election because no polling organization wants to be wrong. The polls showed Al Gore Jr. winning the electoral college and GW winning the popular vote just before the 2000 election and the results turned out exactly the opposite.

[bonnie]

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

in Politics

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows President Obama attracting support from 46% of voters nationwide, while Mitt Romney earns 45% of the vote. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

The president received a modest convention bounce, but that's now gone. On the day the conventions began, Obama was up by two points. Now the numbers are essentially back to that starting point with the president leading by a point. See daily tracking history.

When “leaners” are included, it’s Romney 48% and Obama 47%. Leaners are those who initially indicate no preference for either candidate but express a preference for one of them in a follow-up question.

On the issue of job creation, 47% trust the president more, while 45% have more confidence in Romney. Forty percent (40%) think new government programs to fight unemployment will do more to create jobs. But slightly more (44%) feel cuts in government spending are a better job creator.

If Romney is elected president and Republicans win control of Congress, 45% think it will help the ability of private companies to create new jobs. Thirty-five percent (35%) believe it will hurt private sector job creation. If Obama and the Democrats win, 39% think that will help in the creation of private sector jobs, while 44% believe it will hurt.

Polling for today’s update was completed before the tragic news that the U.S. ambassador to Libya and other American officials were killed in an attack on our embassy there. Polling conducted earlier this year found that 63% of U.S. voters believe there is a conflict in the world today between Western civilization and Islamic nations. The numbers have consistently shown that Americans did not want the United States to get directly involved in the turmoil known by some as the “Arab spring.” Even in the immediate aftermath of the successful mission in Libya last year, just 41% of voters thought we should have undertaken that effort.

At the moment, just five percent (5%) of voters rate national security concerns as the most important voting issue of 2012. We will be watching to see if that shifts in the coming days.

The president leads by one in our daily Swing State tracking. All 11 swing states were won by President Obama in 2008.

[phkrause]

Depends on who or what you read I think, seems from week to week they flip flop. I don't buy any of the polls, they've been wrong time and time again. If I remember correctly they claimed that Bush 1 would win re-election, he lost. They said Clinton would lose re-election, he won. The said Bush 2 would lose, he won. So far I have not got a clear picture of this one. They've gone both ways to many times. I think it will be close and I think Obama will win re-election.

[Guest]

I don't know how you came to that conclusion dgrimm, but you may want to re-think that one, this time around. Because that's not even close to being accurate.

The difference between these two candidates is like night and day. Light and darkness. Gross darkness.