Posts

Pollster Tells America to Be Ready for a Shock on Election Day

/0 Comments/in , , /by

A lot of polls are going to be wrong come Election Day, according to pollster and analyst Pat Caddell who said Friday that America should be ready for a “shock.”

“Something is going on in this country in these polls,” Caddell said, assessing the differences among polls that show Trump with a narrow lead, Clinton with a narrow lead, or Clinton with a large lead. The most recent polls put Trump in the lead.

“All of the tracking polls keep holding at Trump being ahead,” he continued. “And then all of these other polls that are one-off polls, or whatever.”

Caddell said with so many polls, it was hard to know which were reliable.

“I don’t know how they’re doing some of these university polls. You just put the name of some university and apparently it becomes credible, whether they know what they’re doing, or not.”

“But in any event, polling is all over the place. Something isn’t adding up,” said Caddell.

To him, that means there is a trend going on that has not been fully captured in the polls.

“Something is going to happen here, I just sense it,” he said.

That something, he said, could be from Trump, who on Friday in North Carolina promised “Brexit times five.”

Either “Hillary will glide into the White House, or we’re headed for one of the greatest shocks in American politics. I think it’s a very close call. I think the shock potential is enormous,” he said.

Caddell is not alone. Veteran pollster John Zogby noted the immense strength of Trump’s support.

“I’ve been doing this a long, long time and these races go up and down and up and down,” Zogby said. “We still have 18 days to go, that means 18, maybe 36 news cycles as well.”

Zogby noted the depth of support for Trump.

“You see still a very passionate Donald Trump support. I see three credible polls that are out there that show Donald Trump getting 85, 89 percent of Republican support, winning among whites, winning by double digits among men, leading in two of those polls tied in another,” Zogby said.

“For the umpteenth time, it’s way too early and we don’t know who’s going to vote,” he insisted. (For more from the author of “Pollster Tells America to Be Ready for a Shock on Election Day” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Obama Pollster Says Reporters Should Go the Next ‘Year Without Reporting Any Public Polling Data’

/7 Comments/in , , /by

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing

After a year of seeing President Obama’s approval ratings plummet, the president’s pollster is offering a strikingly candid and pessimistic New Year’s resolution.

Reporters should go the next “year without reporting any public polling data,” Joel Benenson, president and CEO of Benenson Strategy Group, said.

His comments were made to reporter Mike Allen, who published them in his daily “Politico Playbook” morning newsletter on Tuesday.

Benenson explained that he thinks the polling often reported by news organizations lacks the proper context.

Read more about the Obama pollster HERE.

Everything You Need to Know About Reading the Polls

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: TheBlaze TVJohn Cardillo, the president and CEO of PsyID, a company specializing in actionable social media intelligence and analytics, appeared on The Glenn Beck Program Wednesday to explain what Americans should know when reading the polls.

Namely, take them with a grain of salt, and there may actually a better way to gauge public opinion. Sometimes, the inaccuracies in polls are even intentional.

“You said to me, ‘I’m doing some polling for the GOP, and they want me to change things to try to change the outcome,’” Beck told Cardillo. “Am I getting that right?”

“Yeah,” Cardillo responded. “There are certain things that if we skew what we do a certain way, the outcome will predict what they want.”

Cardillo said that what his company does is far more accurate than traditional polling because it’s more of a “fly on the wall” approach than “somebody calling you up with ten questions that are designed to elicit a certain response from you to fit an agenda.”

Read more from this story HERE.

California Senate Passes Bill to Allow Non-Citizen Poll Workers to Help Non-English-Speaking Citizens to Vote

/8 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe state Senate on Monday approved legislation that would allow immigrants who are not U.S. citizens to assist voters casting a ballot.

The measure from Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, would allow for up to five non-citizens to serve at a particular polling site. Those poll workers must be permanent U.S. residents who legally entered the country.

Those residents could provide much-needed help to voters with limited English skills, said Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who presented Bonta’s bill. There are 2.6 million eligible California voters who are not fully proficient in English, she said.

“These individuals have the absolute right to make fully informed voting decisions on Election Day,” Torres said.

More than three dozen organizations involved in elections and immigrant advocacy have signaled their support for AB817.

Read more from this story HERE.

Poll Finds 15-Point Drop In Dem Support For Health Law

/1 Comment/in , , /by

photo credit: andrew aliferisDemocratic support for President Obama’s healthcare law has dropped 15 points since November, contributing to a rise in negative attitudes toward the reform, according to a new poll.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act currently outnumber supporters (42 percent to 36), according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s (KFF) latest tracking survey. Public opinion has switched back and forth since the law passed in 2010, and in November, support for the law was 4 percent higher than opposition (43 percent to 39).

Kaiser attributed the marked slide in support among Democrats to a “post-presidential election fade.” In November, 72 percent of that group expressed support for the law, compared with 57 percent who feel favorably toward it now.

Unaffiliated voters saw a similar but less dramatic decline in support, with 32 percent approving of the healthcare law compared with 37 percent in November.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pro-Obama Election Flier Marked With NAACP Seal Featured Klan, Lynching Imagery

/2 Comments/in , , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller A presidential election flier disseminated in North Carolina and marked with a seal for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) featured Ku Klux Klan and lynching imagery as part of its presentation urging voters to head to the polls.

Another pro-Obama flier in North Carolina informed African-American voters that Mitt Romney would relegate them to “picking cotton” if elected president.

The fliers, photographs of which were obtained by The Daily Caller, were found in the Charlotte, North Carolina area on Election Day 2012.

One flier, headlined “Souls to the Polls,” depicts members of the Ku Klux Klan wielding torches and black-and-white illustrations of African-American lynchings. The flier is marked, in its upper left-hand corner, with a seal for the NAACP.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gary Johnson: Obama Will Win

/7 Comments/in , /by

Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson said Monday he thinks President Barack Obama will defeat Mitt Romney to win a second term.

“I think Obama’s going to win, that’s what I think,” Johnson told POLITICO in an interview. “[My vote is] really spread out, meaning I don’t think there’s any state that I’m going to do better than another.”

Johnson, who’s on the ballot in 48 states and the District of Columbia, hovers in single digits in the polls. The former two-term New Mexico governor declined to single out any state where he expected to do particularly well but said he had no regrets about how he ran his campaign.

“There’s nothing,” Johnson said. “I would ask that everybody look at it and maybe recognize that this is phenomenal that we spent $2 million and may get 5 percent of the general – now maybe it doesn’t turn out that way at all – but that we spent $2 million bucks and here we are playing in a game that by all accounts we should not be playing in, so no. Yeah, you make mistakes every single day, but the reality is: Holy cow.”

A CNN Ohio poll released Nov. 2 had Obama at 47 percent, Republican nominee Mitt Romney at 44 percent and Johnson at 5 percent. He has raised about $2.3 million, has about $35,000 on hand and is about $227,000 in debt, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Read more from this story HERE.