As much as I like to quote Mark Twain, I have to acknowledge that sometimes statistics are true. And while I love to make fun of focus groups and other expensive marketing tools, I won't deny that polling works. The problem comes when people who don't understand the nuances of polling interpret the results. To really get inside a poll, you need a fairly sophisticated understanding of data and statistics.
This story about Michael Bloomberg's state-of-the-art polling operation makes some very interesting points --but as is often the case, the most important graf here is the last one. (Talk about "burying the lede"). There have long been pollsters who've attempted to group the electorate into "psychological portraits," or clusters, and no doubt the "never-before-identified" groups Bloomberg's pollsters identified do "transcend the traditional political fault lines of race, party and class," but if Fernando Ferrer had been given (he couldn't afford to pay for it) the same data, he still would have lost to Bloomberg.
For as Ferrer's pollster, Jef Pollock points out, "It's kind of hard to pinpoint things that did work in the face of millions of dollars of broadcast advertising." Q.E.D.
Comments