Word: polling
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...says a TIME poll, but Americans are unhappy with the pair...
This striking reversal of public opinion was uncovered in two surveys conducted for TIME by the research firm of Yankelovich, Skelly & White. The first poll was taken March 19 and 20, the second on March 29 and 30, thus bracketing President Carter's upset losses in the New York and Connecticut primaries.* In the second survey, 44% of those questioned preferred Reagan for President, 43% Carter, and 13% were undecided...
Harris faced another problem, that opinion after he took his last poll was still shifting fast. Says Clark: "In a poll, you are only measuring opinion at a single point in time. Things change and opinions change." It was just such a shift that threw the New Hampshire polls off. Bush and Reagan were doubtless close, but on the Saturday night before the election, Bush got trapped in his refusal to let other G.O.P. candidates join his debate with Reagan, and opinion quickly shifted against...
...fallibility of preprimary polls leads some to dismiss their utility altogether. Says Lucien Haas, an aide to Senate Majority Whip Alan Cranston of California: "The polls are absolutely worthless." That is an exaggeration. The real problem is that since polling can assess the views of a body of voters but not which of those voters will actually vote, a preprimary sampling is only an approximation of what is likely to happen. Any politician or pundit who attributes to such a poll more accuracy or importance than it can realistically have does so at his own risk...
...began in Maine, when George Bush, having read his advance notices, left town and was not around to deliver a victory speech after he won a Republican straw poll. Many journalists underestimated Bush's strength in Iowa and then overreacted to his victory. The day after the caucuses, NBC Correspondent Tom Pettit pronounced Ronald Reagan politically "dead." New Hampshire was easier but still vexing. Morton Kondracke of the New Republic boldly predicted that Bush would win by six percentage points and Jimmy Carter by 20. When Reagan won and Edward Kennedy came close, Kondracke offered a mea culpa...