Now the True Test of the Old Media: Zogby’s Blind Poll

Posted by James Bowery on Tuesday, 20 November 2007 09:18.

As I discussed in my prior article “The Real Reason Ron Paul Supporters Hate the Old Media So Much”, it is high time that the Old Media report more about candidates that match the opinions of the citizenry. It is not only good market research to do such opinion matching as a basis for who they cover, but it is good public service in a republic. Well now Zogby has conducted a “blind poll” letting citizens pick candidates based, not on name recognition, but on description of the candidate and his positions.

Here are the results:

Candidate	Votes
Ron Paul	32.8%
Not Sure	20.8%
Giuliani	18.6%
Romney	15.1%
Thompson	12.6%

Caveat: This blind poll appears to have been commissioned by Alex Jones, and there doesn’t appear to have been much work put into making it unbiased. Nevertheless, the bias of this poll must be compared to the bias of essentially asking “Who have the media been talking about the most?” built into name recognition polls.

If more reputable sources wish to commission their own blind polls, see my prior article linked to above for the methodology to use in designing them with minimum bias.

In the mean time Mr. Jones has at least done the public service of exposing the idea of blind polling.

So, there’s your market research tool, Old Media. Until you commission your own, less biased, blind polls, if not for the ratings, then for the republic: Give Ron Paul at least equal face time.

UPDATE 11:50AM PST: Zogby now reports that they conducted this blind poll on both a general voter population and on the “likely Republican voters”. Consistent with Ron Paul’s leading position in electability odds, it was in the general voter population that Ron Paul won a resounding victory while in the “likely Republican voters” population he came in third of the three candidates presented. One explanation for this disparity is the fact, known to Zogby, that the most important issue to Republican voters is not the war, but immigration and the Zogby blind poll did not describe the candidates’ positions on immigration. It is hard to imagine this is an innocent omission but my earlier article’s methodology for constructing an unbiased blind poll would have, if followed, clearly dealt with this weakness.

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Comments:

Posted by JKHutz on Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:34 | #

This matches up with the relative strength of Ron Paul’s volunteers versus the relative non-existence of volunteers for most of the other GOP candidates—whether they are labeled “front-runner” by the media or not (http://www.infiniteronpaul.com/?page=Shirts)

Likewise, Ron Paul’s supporters were able to en masse donate $4.3 Million dollars (in CASH online) from over 37,000 donors within a 24 hour timespan this past November 5th.

Other candidates (and their few supporters) have been so self-deluded by the media and the “Scientific” polls that they have attempted the same thing (often with statements of such hubris as “well if the paulbots can do that then Our Man Fred should be able to raise twice as much, because he gets more than twice as high &#xwi;se in the media’s polls.”)

The first one to fizzle was Obama—who set a goal of $5M (later lowered to $1M) to be raised on Nov 17th—the final tally? $4,650 from 64 donors. (Yes, Virginia, that was a measly four thousand dollars… not four million, not even four hundred thousand, just over four THOUSAND dollars).

Next up is Huckabee who’s “Hucks Army” is under “orders” to donate just $1 Million on November 20th (that’s today)—looks like he might raise more than Obama, but isn’t even vaguely trying to reach Ron Paul’s level.

The same will be true for the Fred Thompson money dud, and the Dec 7th Romney fiasco (do they really think working Americans will donate hard-earned cash to simply REPAY a millionaire the money he loaned his own campaign? Most are not so foolish.

So, the money confirms and matches (if not exceeds) the level of support shown for Ron Paul within this latest Zogby poll. Doubtless the mainstream media will ignore this poll because it was “different” and therefore will be deemed “unscientific”.

But the results here DO make one wonder—perhaps candidates NAMES should be left off of the ballot, and voters should be made to choose from information like what was in this “blind” poll. It would certainly weed out the “eeny-meeny-miny-moe” that many voters do in picking between the one or two NAMES they have seen on signs or TV… Those voters who were KNOWLEDGABLE, would still know the names, simply because they had done their research. A significant percentage of those to LAZY or APATHETIC to do any research would at least then be forced to choose based on issues and experience.

Posted by John on Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:01 | #

In honor of this poll, I’m going to stop calling Zogby ZOGby.

Posted by Muffin on Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:52 | #

If I were to selectively choose positions I’ll bet I could make the majority, at least a plurality, of KKK members choose Jesse Jackson in a blind poll.

Posted by Bogzy on Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:32 | #

Alex Jones discusses the poll on the last hour of his show on the 19th and through the show of the 20th. The broadcasts can be heard here:

http://www.nw0.info/?p=Radio/Alex Jones Radio Archive/2007/November/

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:34 | #

Thanks for that Bogzy. I’ve blogged it. The soap infomercial was obnoxious, but just slider-bar passed it.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:18 | #

I just saw an unscientific poll in an article linked on the AOL “Welcome” screen, asking “Who would you like to see win the Republican Presidential Nomination?” The choices, listed alphabetically, are “Rudi Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, Fred Thompson, Other.”

Results as of minutes ago (around 8:10 PM):

157, 544 votes cast

Rudi Giuliani 23%

Mike Huckabee 20%

Ron Paul 15%

Fred Thompson 15%

John McCain 10%

Mitt Romney 9%

Other 6%

Tom Tancredo 1%

Duncan Hunter 1%
______

Question: With Ron Paul tied for third place, why is he systematically ignored by the media? Yes the poll is unscientific but not much more so than three fourths of these online polls you see that get shouted about. By the way, I thought word was that ByZOG’s polling in particular was supposed to be more objective even though his brother is big among the pro-Arab faction in this country? What’s happened, has he been bought? Everyone’s got his price, I suppose.