Word: problems
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Public opinion researchers are nearly unanimous in arguing that the problem lies in the special circumstances of primary elections. Unlike general elections, primaries are used by voters to protest, to slow front runners, to send messages of dissatisfaction to incumbents, without anyone bearing the burden of actually deciding who should be President. Ruth Clark, senior vice president of the firm Yankelovich, Skelly and White, says of the much trumpeted primary samplings: "I just don't believe in them...
This was the problem that Louis Harris faced in New York. He was surprised by the low turnout around the state, which left people who felt tepidly pro-Carter at home while people who were angry turned out to vote against him. Laments Harris: "I just wish to hell we'd used a lower turnout figure. We failed on the magnitude of the swing against Carter, but we caught its direction...
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...
...hostage situation were not complex enough, a new problem developed last week when a 23-year-old Tehran college girl, allegedly pregnant by a U.S. Marine hostage, was murdered by her own enraged brother. Said the brother after strangling his sister, then hanging her from an iron post: "The stigma of betrayal by a U.S. spy could only be washed away with blood...