RBR and Rove

[Carolab]

Does Rove want us to believe that men voting for Bush overwhelmed women voting for Kerry and that only men were RBRs? I don't buy this, since women, it is reported, are definitely "moving back" to the Democratic party--

11/4/04 2:00 PM EST
Rove, Card, Rice Scrambled To Nix Exit Poll Scare

Bush-Cheney campaign officials said today that Bush advisor Karl Rove, working with chief of staff Andy Card and national security advisor Condi Rice out of the White House, took the lead Tuesday in refuting early media exit polls showing a big election night loss for President Bush. Officials said the trio, from the Old Family Dining Room, were glued to computers showing GOP exit polling data that conflicted with the early media polls that found Bush losing big in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Rove, working though the Republican information, found that the polls were flawed, especially in that they were not counting men proportionally. He and others sent out word that the polls were wrong, just as calls were coming in from gloomy aides around the nation.


Bush officials said that they got their message out at about 3 p.m., and memos from White House surrogates started filling GOP Blackberries criticizing the polls and explaining that the president was actually doing better than they showed. "We had good solid numbers," said an insider. "We were always running ahead" of Sen. John Kerry. Armed with the info, the White House blasted out talking points "just to keep our people up," said an official.
–Paul Bedard, U.S. News

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/bulletin/archive/bull041104m.htm

[jobycom]

1. Okay, I'm pretty good with acronyms, but I missed rbr...

Please fill me in?

[Carolab]

3. Reluctant Bush Responder theory.

As advanced by Edison-Mitofsky as an explanation for their faulty polls, and as dismissed extensively here by TruthIsAll.

[jobycom]

5. Interesting

A guy I work for told me just before the elections that he thought a lot of people were going to vote for Bush who said they were going to vote for Kerry. He was talking about himself, but trying to hide it. He's a borderline Democrat whose son is an up-and-comer political handler for Democrats here in Austin. He couldn't admit he was voting for Bush, but he told me that with the "war" on, it just might seem wrong to some to vote for Kerry, even though they wanted to.

So there is some truth to that theory, sad as it may be. I had just never heard it spelled out before.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[jobycom]

7. LOL

I didn't exactly contradict it, just offered anecdotal evidence that undermines it...

[emulatorloo]

8. OTOH would he lie to an exit pollster about it?

You are right that there were voters who probably would have voted for Kerry had they not had it drummed into them (by Bush campaign) that you don't change Presidents in the middle of a war. I can see why he might lie to you about his vote. Would he lie to an exit poller? Why? Interested in your theory.

[Sawyer]

10. Here is some evidence that "shy conservative"

is a factor not just in US polls, but abroad as well:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/11/04/do0405.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/11/04/ixop.html

For years, British pollsters have had to deal with the Shy Tory factor, where conservatives are too cowardly to admit their ruthless conservatism to pollsters and so they pretend they are voting for nice New Labour or the Lib Dems. Some pollsters actually build in a Shy Tory factor into their research and add on a few points to the Tories as a matter of course.

By the time of the 1992 election, Shy Toryism was endemic: the polls pointed to a clear Neil Kinnock victory, but the Shy Tories crept into the polling booths in their millions, recording the greatest amount of Conservative votes ever.

Australia was also hit by Shy Toryism last month. The incumbent prime minister, John Howard, was said to be level-pegging in all the polls with his Left-of-centre opponent, Mark Latham, only to pull off a crushing victory in the election.

Shy Toryism is rampant, too, throughout France and Italy, where to emanate soft-Left opinions is to be morally superior; where voting for centre-Right Chirac or Berlusconi is what you do once you've left the dinner party table and you're safely tucked behind the polling booth curtain.

...

America, though, has always been the home to heart-on-your-sleeve Republicanism, built along the lines of that 1950s Tory feeling - where a pride in patriotism and small government has been something to shout about.

That shouting has gone quiet, under the assault of Michael Moore, mainstream European opinion and the slivers of liberal America that run down the East and West coasts.

..... and some more from http://www.alba.org.uk/polls/accuracy.html

In 1992, the opinion polls, which had normally predicted election results fairly accurately, were not just wrong but spectacularly so. The five main UK polls published on the morning of the general election predicted a Labour lead of 0.8 %, which would have ensured a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party. The BBC and ITV exit polls suggested a Conservative lead of 4%, which would have resulted in a hung parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party. In fact, the Conservatives were 7.5 % ahead and John Major was able to form a Conservative government with an overall majority of 21 seats.

...a massive 4-5 % which was accounted for by 'shy' Tory voters who had refused to answer the pollsters questions.

[emulatorloo]

11. Slightly Different - Conservatives are the minority there

and throwing out a stereotype, in general Brits are more reticent and softspoken than Americans.

[Sawyer]

13. Notice that the biggest "shy tory" effect happened

when Tories actually won the elections. And as it says in the article I quoted, the effect crosses national lines - from "softspoken" Americans to "in your face" French and Italians.

[Chi]

15. That is interesting

I've never heard of the shy Tory effect.

Would you have any other links, than what you have posted.
Surely, if this has merit, we can find better than an opinion piece.

How bout something from academia, and we might want to keep it about exit polls, since that it where rbr lives.

Just a thought.

[Sawyer]

16. It's "Tory"

I posted two links - one is newspaper, another is a Scottish political web site.

The "shy tory" effect, as described, applies both to pre-election polls and to exit polls.

As for academia - you may want to ask Febble for that, she is from UK and would probably have a better idea about it. What I could find is:

http://www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2002/failure-of-the-polls-1997.htm

Not only does it discuss the "shy Tory" effect, but it also deals with the "false memory" - that is, people misreporting whom they voted for in the past.

[Chi]

17. Thanx for the spelling correction

Yes, I saw both links, one was an opinion piece, the other was an opinion piece from a partisan site about pre-election polls.

Thanx for the new link, it looks much more believable.
I will read it later since I am running out.

I don't think Febble is around anymore, but I'm surprised she didn't bring this up when she was since so many here thought the rbr was not believable.

[Sawyer]

18. She did, several times,

it was completely ignored.

[tommcintyre]

30. For credibility, provide the links to where Febble said this

That's how we do things around here. If you make a claim, you back it up.

[Sawyer]

33. Here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x366408

post #32 and #33

[tommcintyre]

40. It still doesn't support rBr

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x366408#366597
"Right now, all headlines say Blair won, citing exit polls. Go figure. nt"
------------------------
32. They don't bother
<snip: what seems to apply most:>
"...they factor in "shy Tories" and the exits have been closer to the the count. <No attempt to correlate to rBr.>

The thing is no-one takes them too seriously, and our count is so transparent that no-one would think of using them as an audit on the election. <VERY different than our elections, eh?>

All the paper ballots are hand counted in public, under the close scrutiny of representatives from all parties. The counts are televised, and the results are announced at the count when it is complete and all candidates are satisfied with the results." <This doesn't REMOTELY sound like our "secretive" (potentially corrupt) system - I wish our system was like this.>
---------------
<Note: not all "conservatives" are created equal. Our current neocon/religious fanatic-types hardly resemble the more traditional UK conservatives. So to try to compare them like this is absurd.

In the past, I have seen quotes that their conservatives resemble more our "Clintonesque" "new democrats", so HOW can you possibly compare? The possibility of rKr is just as likely and supposedly supported. In truth, it's useless to try and correlate the two "conservatives - it's like comparing apples and oranges.>
33. Well there are two reasons they "work" in the UK

Edited on Fri May-06-05 12:33 AM by Febble
"One is that because our count is utterly transparent, fraud is scarcely an issue (although that may change this year with postal voting more common). No-body disputes the count. This means that any discrepancy between exit and count is assumed to be a problem in the exit polls.

There used to be a tendency for exit polls to over-estimate the Labour vote, and in 1992 they got it seriously wrong, and predicted a Labour majority although not an outright win. In the end the Tories got in with a working majority. It was our "2004". Since then the pollsters factor in "shy conservatives" - and they have have been more accurate since.

So unless our elections really have been seriously fraudulent for years, it does suggest that "shy conservatives" are a real phenomenon. <false logic since our conservatives are so different from theirs.> And there is absolutely no evidence that our elections are fraudulent because the count is so transparent."

[Chi]

34. Another link with no exit polls

Your last link is not about exit polls either.
Though it does bring up the 'shy Tory' theory, it's conclusions don't support it, IMO.

All from the 'Conclusion' section
"True, in 1997 those who did not indicate how they would vote were at least as likely to be closet Liberal Democrats as shy Conservatives, but the need to be able to estimate their likely behaviour is clear."

"The gap between the proportion claiming to have voted Labour in the 1992 election and the actual election outcome appears to be simply too large to be accounted for by voters’ misremembering how they behaved in the past, but rather appears to be evidence of a pro-Labour bias."

"Our analysis suggests that there is no one simple solution; all aspects of sampling methodology, question technique and analysis needs to be considered."

Febble also called it a pro-labour bias, which appears to be more accurate.

[Sawyer]

35. Since it seems that my responses are being

deleted, it seems pointless to post any more on this thread. I will leave you guys to it.

[Chi]

36. You might wanna review the forum rules

I have had maybe three deletions since I've started posting here, all three were because I broke the rules.

If you were deleted for any other reason, please let me in on it, and I will start looking for somewhere else to read...I won't put up with that.
I've been to FR, and I know how bad it can get.

[tommcintyre]

38. I wasn't surprised those two posts were deleted

He DID break the rules. (I almost did too in my response to him, but I self-deleted (edited) before I posted my replies ;) )

[Chi]

39. Ohhh...OK

That would explain it then.
Glad you didn't follow suit.

[tommcintyre]

41. Me too. Well... sort of. ;)

If I'm at all pissed off, I try to follow the "Mark Twain method". He would put his scathing letters-to-the-editor in a drawer overnight. Seldom did any of them ever get mailed.

I don't usually wait overnight, but I do write them up in notepad, and let them sit for a while before posting them.

It probably saves some deletions, but I still have the satisfaction of writing them , don't I? :evilgrin:

[tommcintyre]

37. 80 percent of your posts were NOT deleted

10 posts total, 2 deleted, 8 are still here (and likely to remain). Why did those two get deleted, and the other 8 did not? I read them, and I know why. I'm sure you know why too. You didn't follow the forum rules. You were: baiting, inflaming, insulting - take your pick.

But your logic of using "Since it seems that my responses are being deleted..." as an excuse for bailing out really says a lot, doesn't it?

Could the REAL reason you bailed be that your arguments were being easily discredited/exposed here?

[tommcintyre]

29. Ya gotta compare "apples 'n apples", NOT apples and oranges

It's bad enough when all that statisticians have to work with is inferred, rather than direct data (as M-E et. al did with the rBr hypothesis).

So NOW you propose we consider as "evidence", an inferred study, done in a totally different political climate?

There is a reason they called it the "shy Tory" - NOT "universal shy conservative", or voter, etc. It would make no more sense for the proponents of rBr to try to extrapolate their results to apply to the Brits, etc.

What you have attempted to do is add credibility to the rBr hypothesis with a study that was never designed/intended to have any such possible use.

This just won't fly.

[tommcintyre]

27. This is NOT "evidence"

You present an opinion piece, and something from a partisan (biased) political site about pre-election polls??? And you refer to this as "evidence"?

This is NOT objective evidence in any sense of the meaning.

[Sawyer]

28. I guess you missed this

http://www.icmresearch.co.uk/reviews/2002/failure-of-the-polls-1997.htm

"One of the key conclusions to emerge from the various post-mortems into why the polls went astray in 1992 was that those who refused or would not say how they would vote in the event proved to be more likely to be Conservative voters than those who would declare their intentions (MRS, 1994; Sparrow and Turner, 1995)."

It is not an "opinion" that British polls, both pre-election and exit, have consistently overestimated Labor vote until 1992, when they got so bad that something needed to be done. It is not an "opinion" that the pollsters in Britain found the "shy Tory" effect, correcting for which produces much more precise polling nowadays. It is a "fact".

[tommcintyre]

32. Nope, I dealt with it here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x368014#368202

<I said:>
"There is a reason they called it the "shy Tory" - NOT "universal shy conservative", or voter, etc. It would make no more sense for the proponents of rBr to try to extrapolate their results to apply to the Brits, etc.

What you have attempted to do is add credibility to the rBr hypothesis with a study that was never designed/intended to have any such possible use."
-----------
Your quote above only backs up this conclusion: Note the words "British", "Labor", "Tory", etc. And the total lack of ANY claim that this hypothesis would apply to ANY political climate other than their own. You attempted a BIG stretch there, and it just doesn't work.

[jobycom]

12. Yes, he would

He's the type who worries too much about what other people think, even if he claims to be the opposite. So yeah, he even talked about "this type of person" lying to pollsters about who they voted for.

The other side is you can just avoid exit pollsters. Some people, even people who claim to have strong math and statistics backgrounds, don't seem to understand how polls work. Exit polls can't tell you anything about who is winning an election. Polls rely on carefully selected random samples. You assume a certain number of a certain demographic group will vote, and you take a sample from that group and project it forward to calculate how an election will turn out. But you can't be sure in an exit poll that your assumption is correct. You're guessing that 20% of voters will be aged 18-25, for instance, and that 51% of those will be women. So you ask people how old they are and you mark their gender and calculate how many people will vote in that age group. But you can't really know how many will vote in that age group until it is over. You can have 100 people in that age group say yes to being polled as they leave the booth, while people in another age group completely avoid you. Your raw numbers will show that age group heavily represented, but you have no idea whether that's accurate. It could be that all 100 of the people in that group sought you out, while those in another age group which outnumbered them avoided you. Or it could be that only those who were voting Democrat in that age group agreed to be interviewed, and those voting Republican--because of all the hype telling them to avoid pollsters-refused to be interviewed.

Exit polls can be used in conjunction with the early return numbers to give a decent prediction of an election's outcome, unless the election is close. The other purpose of exit polls is day-after analysis. You fit the demographics of those you polled to the actual numbers of those who voted, and you can analyze how each group actually voted. Some people misunderstand when they hear about exit polls being adjusted to actual numbers. That sounds like they are rigging the numbers. But in actuality all they are doing is readjusting their assumptions on the random samples. ALL polls are adjusted to fit a set of assumptions. The difference between pre and exit polls is that you can't tell if your pre-election poll assumptions are correct. With exit polls, you can make them correct, because you have the actual results.

None of this means there couldn't have been fraud in the elections, only that polls are worthless in determining it.

My friend would have lied to a pollster. His son is a high profile Democrat (or is becoming one) and his ex wife works for a Democratic state legislator, so my friend was ashamed of how he was planning to vote (as he should have been). But more likely than him lying to a pollster would have been him avoiding them. That would give less representative numbers, too.

[autorank]

19. Take a look at the evidence...

Here's intimidation, of Kerry voters...it was everywhere and it had a synergistic effect on exit polling responses, I'll bet a Franklin.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x367249

Also look at EM's comments on exit polling and respondents and the accuracy of exit polls in 1996 and 2000. I think this is a Red Herring your discussing.

:hi:

[jobycom]

20. That's not evidence, it's stories

And it has nothing to do with anything I said in my post. The intimidation and other tactics kept Democratic voting down. I've said all along Bush's side cheated. Whether it was enough to change the outcome, I don't know. I'm not even convinced there wasn't a lot of vote rigging after the election, though I haven't seen hard evidence of it.

The initial point I made was that there were people who voted for Bush and lied about it. That fit the "RBR" image I asked about in my initial post. There were RBRs. How many, on what scale, etc, I have no idea, and made no guess at.

The point I made about exit polls stands on its own--you can't use exit polls to prove anything about how people voted. They are random opinions from random people, comprising probably less than .001% of voters. The raw data would be no more accurate than walking into a barber shop and asking people how they voted. What answers you got would depend on what barber shop you went to, what time of day you went, etc. The only way exit poll data has any significance is if it is fit into a statistical formula, and then the picture you create from the formula is only as good the assumptions you base your formula on. If your assumptions are wrong, then your statistical model--your predictions--are meaningless. You can't use exit poll data to prove that your formula was wrong, because the data is based on your formula. You can only test your formula and your assumptions by comparing them to another standard--either another poll, as is done before the elections, or the actual election returns, as is done after the elections.

None of that says there wasn't cheating, intimidation, etc. My only point is that any argument claiming there was fraud based on the exit polls is invalid, unless there is some quantifiable proof that the formulas used in the exit polling were dead-on accurate, and there is no way to prove that, since the formulas are hypothetical. It hardly matters if the formulas were more accurate in 96 or 2000--it was a different election. That would be like saying a Beatles song performed by the Aaron Carter would sound just as good because it was the same song.

The fraud has to be found by looking at the election results, registration rolls, actual voter turnout, and hand counts of the votes which could indicate vote counting discrepancies. Not at polling data. And as for the intimidation of voters, yes, it needs to be investigated, but some dumb poll worker complaining about a shirt in Houston had nothing to do with the long lines in Ohio--the list of evidence in your link is just a bunch of disconnected stories. You need more systematic evidence.

[autorank]

21. Stories are one starting point for the evaluation of evidence.

Your post was highly anecdotal so, at this opint, it's a matter of whose stories you believe.

There is abundant evidence of election fraud and you'll have no trouble finding it. I'm at work so my response has to be brief.

Exit polling is fascinating. It was used in the Ukraine to topple a tyrant, it was used in GB recently to predict a highly complex election to the tee. Why are you so bent out of shape about it and feeling such a need to discredit our best top-down evidence (these are not stories, BTW) short of an admission by the culprits that they fixsed the election.

There are a lot of people who show up here saying, "Oh, there was fraud but polling is no way to show it." Nonsense.

If you want to have a look at the evidence and analysis of exit polling and other facotrs and have a dialog with the resident expert,


Start here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=366334

Then look at this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=366149

Then go look up TruthIsAll on an active thread of his and get an education on exit polling.

Enjoy! Now, back to work (unless you want to pay me for talking to you, haha)

:hi:

[TruthIsAll]

48. My award goes to you for "most pathetic line of reasoning" ever on DU

"The difference between pre and exit polls is that you can't tell if your pre-election poll assumptions are correct. With exit polls, you can make them correct, because you have the actual results".

Are you serious?

What if the "actual" results are corrupted?

What happens when you apply corrupted results to "correct" a poll? Will that "fix" the poll or just corrupt it?

Think hard on that.

[tommcintyre]

49. That high of a post count, and "reasoning" = denial

There are "five figure" posters who told me back in November, "get over it, Bush won, this was just another election, etc.)

Riiiight! I guess it's hard for some people, no matter how much experience they have, to admit the enormity of the problem.

People who keep their head in the sand have no chance to "see it coming"!

[tommcintyre]

25. Hmm... So who is "dogmatic"?

You said:
"how dare you contradict the "official board dogma"

After reading this post, and your ensuing ones, YOU come across as dogmatic. You present no real applicable evidence, just an inflexible opinion. That, by definition, is being dogmatic.

[Sawyer]

26. The fact that there is an observable

"shy conservative effect" in polls in a lot of Western countries is "real applicable evidence". The stuff that I see from people who discount RBR is anecdotal evidence of the type "all my neighbors are Republicans who voted for Kerry".

[tommcintyre]

31. Then you have been "seeing what you want to see"

You said:
"The stuff that I see from people who discount RBR is anecdotal evidence of the type "all my neighbors are Republicans who voted for Kerry".

Especially, since Febble came here, there has been much discussion that goes FAR beyond the anecdotal level - on both sides. Inferred and direct statistical analysis - and general critical thinking arguments - have been applied.

I would provide you with the links, but there has been so much lately, you simply can't avoid them if you browse back a few pages.

[electropop]

9. That's very different from my experience.

I worked the phone banks for Kerry. Many times I spoke with staunch Republicans who sadly reported they had to vote for Kerry because they couldn't stand Bush. I have also seen that even with the right wingers in my office.

[jobycom]

14. I saw that, too. One doesn't rule out the other. But for a poll

What matters is how honest someone is. A staunch Republican sadly reporting to a phone bank that they are voting for Kerry is not trying to hide who they voted for. An RBR by definition is.

[electropop]

42. Yes by definition an RBR doesn't admit his sin.

But clearly defining them does not make them real. My impression is that Bushitler voters are proud to be morons, and very vocal about it.

[dchill]

4. rBr=

reluctant Bush responder.

Check out all TruthIsAll's work in this section of DU.

[Erika]

2. Karl Rove is a liar

as is W's administration. We know for a fact that more people voted for Gore in 2000 and we're darn sure more voted for Kerry in 04. The Bush administration are slimy beyond belief. They are in the pockets of globalists and could care less about the American citizen. I don't even think they think of themselves as anything other than globalists, and they're damn proud of it as income shrinks, our infrastructure is in tatters, and we pay for illegals health bills while we can't afford our own. That is the legacy of Bush and his obscene administration.

[Peace Patriot]

22. Why is it not possible simply to add up the votes and tell who won...

...the 2004 election?

If the Bush regime had wanted a transparent election, why didn't we have one?

-----

On "rBr":

Who would be more likely to lie to an exit pollster? A Bushite (no shy Tory he--I'm sorry) who voted for Bush in BushWorld, along with all of his BushWorld golf partners--or his Republican wife whose father despised deficits and foreign adventures, who got herself pregnant by her irresponsible, drug addict boyfriend when she was 16 and had gotten an abortion, and who has decided to vote for Kerry, even though her husband, the members of her church, her social friends and business associates all seemed to be Bushites except for the silent ones whose political views she doesn't know?

Given this social context, would she be likely to admit a vote for Kerry to a strange pollster in a public place (or any place)?

What would her Bushite husband have to fear disclosing a vote for Bush in BushWorld, if a pollster asked him about it? What would his wife have to fear admitting a vote for Kerry to a stranger a few blocks from her house?

Keep in mind that Republicans were required to sign loyalty oaths to Bush to attend a campaign rally, and that Republican subculture has become more than normally repressive and coercive, colored over with rightwing Christian Calvinism and southern "know-nothing-ism", and with Bush's white bully boy personality somehow considered saintly and Jesus-like. (I can't figure it out? Can you?) A bit delusional. A bit nuts (maybe more than a bit). Imagine trying to think for yourself in this context--or even, ye gods!, deciding to defect from it in how you vote (secret ballot and all).

Add to this the news monopolies' relentless pro-Bush propaganda and cute winks at his enormous crimes, so that he seems to be popular, or, in any case, very powerful--even though he acted like an idiot in the debates and hasn't found any WMDs under the Oval Office rug. Church, social club, husband, golf partners, all seeming to buy into it (except for the quiet ones), and the media creating a glitzy illusionist glow around bully boy Bush's head, but you just can't get past that deficit, or that war, or that threat to Roe vs. Wade.

There are a lot of scenarios one can think of. In none of them does a Bushite fear admitting a vote for Bush in our illusion of a democracy (BushWorld). In most of them, the Bushite is proud of his/her vote, and would want all of his/her friends, family, church members and business associates to know about it, and might even be anxious to establish that 2004 superseded 2000, removing that dark cloud over Bush's legitimacy.

It's the defectors and the doubters who would be actually extremely unlikely to admit voting for Kerry, not the true believers.

As for a few outliers who may still believe the rightwing's "liberal media" myths--who hadn't noticed the relentless pro-Bush, rightwing slant in all monopolized media since 9/11--and who might therefore walk away from a pollster out of hatred for "liberal elitist academic New York scum," THEIR prejudice had long ago been noted by pollsters and factored into the polls, and was already giving Republicans and Bush an edge in the polling samples (non-responders factored in).

What cannot have been factored in were the social and political climate of 2004, in which--recently--30 Baptists were thrown out of their church in Waynesville, NC, for refusing to pledge loyalty to Bush. Would those thirty people have admitted a vote for Kerry--if they had cast one--to a strange pollster?

We have never seen such repression and fear-mongering, and fear, in our country--not since the McCarthy "red-baiting" era (and even then, it was not acceptable to centrist Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower).

I submit that there was a significant vote against Bush by Republican voters, which was missed by the exit polls--because Republicans feared admitting such a vote, and because the exit polls had failed to factor in this unexpected defection and were instead weighting their polls the other way, toward "Reluctant Republican Responders" who voted for Bush, a poll weighting that was no longer relevant in BushWorld.

I think these votes--Republican votes for Kerry--were the easiest votes for Bush hackers to switch around without detection. And I think they stole them (2% of the vote--a little over 2 million votes--conservative estimate). (The rest of the theft consisted of changing Kerry votes to Bush votes with the secret, proprietary DRE touchscreen programming and other easy electronic code insertion, such as programs defaulting to Bush, or deleting Kerry votes in a party vote, and massive violations of the Voting Rights Act, all against Democratic voters, in Ohio, Florida and other places--all of this with voluminous documentation. The Democrats had an almost 60/40 edge in new voter registration in 2004--a blowout success; they got the majority of new voters; they got the vast majority of Nader voters, and they got a big turnout of highly motivated Gore 2000 voters--a combination that was unbeatable except by election fraud. I think Kerry won by about 6%--a landslide). (Look at the opinion polls on Bush policy in recent months--60%, 70% opposed--and Bush's continued miserable approval ratings. WHERE is his support?)

There is no evidence for "Reluctant Republican Responders" who voted for Bush. There is no data to support it. It is hot air--convenient hot air, puffed out by the exit pollsters (Edison-Mitofsky) to cover their asses, and immediately picked up and propagated by Karl Rove and his lapdog media, to try to point doubt away from the official tally.

These same exit pollsters have, to this day, refused to release their raw data--were slow to release ANY data--and furthermore CHANGED the exit polls (Kerry won) on everybody's TV screens on election night to fit the official tally (Bush won). Their theory (and it is just that, pure theory) as to why Kerry won the exit polls is not to be trusted.

-----

I want to repeat my opening questions:

Why is it not possible simply to add up the votes and tell who won the 2004 election?

If the Bush regime had wanted a transparent election, why didn't we have one?

And now I want to add a question:

If the Bush regime had wanted a transparent election, why did they do everything they could to PREVENT it--including blockading a paper trail for electronic voting that had been proposed in Congress--a "no brainer" type of transparency--from ever getting out of committee?

[Name removed]

23. Deleted message

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[Carolab]

24. The point of my post was simply this

Does the rBr theory jibe with Rove's election night statement that men were being proportionately under-represented?

[Febble]

43. About "rBr"

aka "differential non-response", a hazard in all surveys:

Saying the exit poll discrepancy may have been due to "reluctant Bush responders" is not the same as saying that "Bush responders were reluctant".

About 53% of voters were not reluctant. They are probably the ones with the bumper stickers.

Of the remaining voters (a lot of each), most of them were probably in a hurry. But some of them probably didn't like answering the pollster's questions.

All the "rBr" hypothesis is saying is that of those who were reluctant to respond, a slightly larger proportion were Bush voters . And it is only a very slightly larger proportion. Of those who refused to take part, the hypothesis is that 47% of them were Kerry voters and 53% of them were Bush voters.

This hypothesis needs to be kept in perspective. You may not like it, it may not even be true, but it's far from implausible, however many loud Bush voters you know. How would you know the few quiet ones even existed?

[Chi]

44. The question that I hit every time

How about carrying it one step futher...
Care to hypothesize what the effect is that triggered these Bush voters to be so reluctant?

Being that the trend (hypothetically) is so far spread and reasonably consistent, my mind always ponders the source.
Problem is, I can never come up with a reasonable hypothesis to explain it.

[Febble]

45. Shame? n/t

[Chi]

46. Ummm...OK

"Problem is, I can never come up with a reasonable hypothesis to explain it"

I'll assume, by the brevity and confidence of your answer,....that neither can you.
(not a dig)

Thank you for your time.

[Peace Patriot]

47. The people who shredded the paper trail before the election, and...

...who permitted secret, proprietary programming code in electronic voting machines and tabulators...so their good buddies and big donors at Diebold and ES&S could do whatever they wanted with their vote totals..and who invaded Iraq and slaughtered over 100,000 innocent people, based on a 100% pack of lies, shouldn't be permitted to pollute the public airwaves with their opinion about whether THEIR exit polls or INDEPENDENT exit polls were correct. They should be in jail.