"Gallup-ing to the right..."

A few days ago I wrote about bad pollsters and their terrible partisan methodologies. Well it seems I'm not the only one who feels this way. MoveOn.orgtook out a full page ad in The New York Times (page 5!) questioning Gallup's methods and numbers. Gallup is the biggest culprit in the bad numbers atrocity of current polling techniques. It's unfortunate that they also happen to be one of the most cited polls in mainstream press. If you haven't seen the ad, click the link. It's striking and effective. Not to mention dead on.

It's interesting to note though, that despite these bad polling techniques (essentially counting more Republican voters by a hugely irresponsible margin) their bias may be worsening, but their results in favor of Bush is not. After supplying CNN and USA Today with a poll two weeks ago that showed a double-digit Bush lead amongst likely voters that turned out to have a significant bias in its sample favoring the GOP, Gallup did it again yesterday. Except that yesterday, they not only did it again, they apparently felt that a 7% GOP bias wasn't good enough. So they perpetrated the same fraud upon the media (including their partners CNN and USA Today) and voters and this time used a 12% GOP bias in their likely voter screen. I kid you not. But this time the margin of fake-victory attributed to Bush is less. 52-44% Down from 55-42% with a smaller bias towards republicans. So it would seem even these horrendously bad polls are good for something. We can conclude that Kerry is doing even better than Gallup would have you believe.