Is Mike Allen Really This Ignorant? Assessing Polls Weblogging
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Nate Silver aggregates all the information from all the polls--uses changes in all polls to estimate a trend, uses that trend to "age" all polls taken up to the present, adds them together, and then combines that average with the "fundamental" produced by economic factors. Gary Langer looks at one and only one poll and spins a plausible story from it--pretending that no other polls exist.
Yet Mike Allen sees both--the one based on intelligently aggregating all polls, and the one based on one single poll--as equally authoritative:
THE WAY TO WIN: Obama, Romney aides make state-by-state case: MORNING MINDMELD: If you’re a political junkie, enjoy it, soak it in: In our lifetimes, there may never be another race that looks this close for the final two weekends. Yesterday, two of the most widely followed polling analysts drew opposite conclusions about who has Big Mo:
Nate Silver, who gives Obama a 73% chance of winning, argued in the morning that the move to Romney had “stopped”: “What isn’t very likely … is for one candidate to lose ground in five of six polls if the race is still moving toward him.…"
ABC’s Gary Langer popped his analysis of the latest ABC-WP tracking poll, which had: “[T]he momentum on underlying issues and attributes is Romney’s. Romney’s gains are clear…"
So how did Mike Allen get this pig-ignorant? How does he stay this pig-ignorant?
