And there’s nothing to indicate R2000 is doing any such thing. Their poll appears to be legit and in line with similar research. Any claim to the contrary is pretty much baseless from a technical standpoint.

Lest your feeble mind thinks for whatever reason NJ is agreeing with you.

NJ-Aviator said:

Are there ways to manipulate research without being obvious about it and making it exceedingly difficult to uncover? Yes. Seed the sample with more of a particular geography that favors your desired result and make sure your geographical granularity won’t reveal
this…
I’ll add that I’ve never, ever been involved in that or anything like it. And I know of no polling organization that has or probably ever considered doing such a thing.

What I’m thinking one has to keep in mind, NJ-A, is that Delair Ali is R2000. If the late George Gallup had himself been Gallup, I’d call BS there, too. Especially if he were given to posting near psychotic, semi-literate rantings filled with trite partisan cliches on the official Gallup site.

I wont even get into the snortworthiness of the “R2000″ site itself, if you have a buddy who’s very experienced in the area of business “internet presence” have him look it over (not just the guy’s rantings). I don’t believe he’d even have to compare and contrast with a known legit polling entity like Gallup to tell you it reeks of your garden variety free Geocities homepage type vanity business. e.g. “We here at MegaSuperStuff will do the bestest work for cheap”. I always assume the guy has hired the Queen Of England just so he can rightfully use the “Royal We”.

Now, keeping that in mind I’d obviously drop “polling organization” and as I’ll show considerations such as “seeding”.

Think “Jesse MacBeth”.

I could quite easily come up with much more detailed, real knock-your-socks off indepth polling data from over the last 10 years on the basic question of what percentage of the American public believes in UFOs. It would take maybe an hour to see what was the historical polling data on the question. It would take me much less time to mirror that data, adding in variations. Afterall, polling isn’t an exact science and like all pollsters, so the data I (er, “We”) came up with would be off once in a great while . I could produce as many truckloads of background and supporting data as I cared to; though too much reaching around to one’s backside could bring on a bad case of repitive stress syndrome.

The thing is, I’d easily be able to find thousands of who people who would cite my indepth, irrefutable as meaning something one way or another.

If I believed I had been abducted by aliens and felt highly motivated to convince others on their existence, sweeting a wee bit the average I had copied from legit pollsters is no
problem.

If I run into a UFO cult like “Heaven’s Gate” that wants to buy a pollster who can produce mountains of data and help their cause, all the better. I may ger RPS from all the “data-pulling” but I have a well-heeled sugardaddy whose agenda I share to pick up the healthcare tab.

Something I wasn’t aware of was the association of the founder with what appears to be the hard left

.

That’s elementary, tip o’ the iceburg material. They’s a whole lotta things I didn’t get into here, NJ-A. I’m actually quite pleased this guy is the Kos house “pollster”, I’ll be curious if he’ll be retained as bunker time gets nearer to help Kos lay out plans out New Berlin.

Though you should note the timeframe of that rant against Limbaugh in particular. This was during the Carville/Rahm days of concocting a WH plan against Limbaugh and putting out the talking points for their minions to parrot. Remember the plan was to try to make “Limbaugh the leader of the GOP.”? The guy just kicks out what is expected of him.

Too bad Chappy had to take this so personally. It always kinda amazes me when people get upset onine. I think we’ve both seen even conservative folks who have had – or come close to having – an “online breakdown”. An old saying in the computer world goes: “it’s all ones and zeros”, ie. it’s nothing more than just binary bits of data going back and forth. I would’ve just thanked you for trying to being diplomatic all around and let it go at that. But, we’s all different and I suppose that is what helps to keep this planet interesting.

Albeit it was via a strained intepration of another commenter after your cry for help.

Strained interpretaion? Seriously, you must be being purposely obtuse at this point.

Looking at the demographic breakdown of the R2000 poll, I didn’t see anything that would invalidate the results. It appeared to be a representative sample.

But in comparing to other polls, or some hypothetical golden standard, it seemed fine to me. Yeah, I’m suspect of the Kos/Soros influence. But I honestly can’t see how they could have influenced the research.

respondent’s party affiliation is actually pretty close to the Pew Research poll from 2008. A point low on R’s and a point high on Dems. But reasonably close.

So maybe inclusion of all adults tilts it a little left as compared to a likely voter poll, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it evil, biased propaganda. They aren’t hiding the demos. And I’m someone who pretty much despises Kos.

And I wouldn’t trust the Kossacks as far as I could throw them either, but there’s nothing that I can find that says this poll was massaged in a way that would invalidate it technically

But in this case, there really isn’t anything in the poll to base any skepticism on, except that Kos is the pollster’s client. And that’s admittedly a weak argument in this case.

Now read those again and try to keep your idiot cap off while you do it. What is he saying? Skepticism is fine but the poll appears legitimate. What was I saying? Sketicism is fine but the poll appears legitimate. What are you saying? Well on its face you are saying that skepticism means automatic dismissal, which is retarded.

On a deeper level, though, you are saying that you are either an imbecile or purposely disingenuous, neither of which is very good.

I’m guessing the latter. You have proposed absurd analogies to support your opinion (comparing scientific studies to opinion polls) You have outright lied about my position (see post 136). You have bluntly refused to answer my questions after insisting the debate could not continue further until I answered yours (multiple times). You have flatly ignored the plain meaning of words and comments. You have evaded and avoided actually dealing with he issue at had with pathetic attempts to somehow make this about my so called lack of reasoning process using an analogy of an expert witness, which by the way actually contradicts your argument since to discredit an expert witness you actually HAVE TO PROVE THEIR ASSERTIONS WRONG ON THEIR FACE. A fine point you seemed to have missed or ignored.

So if I sound upset, yes I am. I suspect your condescending tone in your last couple posts is meant to tweak my ire. I will admit it is working. Because I have wasted far too much time arguing with either a legitimately mentally handicapped person or a person that went into this debate with zero interest in actually having a debate in good faith.

I hope I am just dealing with a childish intellect. Otherwise I pity your family, and god help any children you may have a hand in raising.

purplepeep said:

NJ-A. If you’ve ever spent any time in IT work (esp. in security)

I have… and I understand what you mean. Are there ways to manipulate research without being obvious about it and making it exceedingly difficult to uncover? Yes. Seed the sample with more of a particular geography that favors your desired result and make sure your geographical granularity won’t reveal this. The one problem is…. your polls that are conducted in this way will always contradict polls that were not intentionally biased. That in an of itself will raise questions about your polling orgs methodology. Not to mention once called number lists are analyzed, it will be obvious what was done.

I’ll add that I’ve never, ever been involved in that or anything like it. And I know of no polling organization that has or probably ever considered doing such a thing. And there’s nothing to indicate R2000 is doing any such thing. Their poll appears to be legit and in line with similar research. Any claim to the contrary is pretty much baseless from a technical standpoint. But I understand that it could be done. Just as I understand security flaws and other nefarious things related to IT, but would never participate. It’s simply my job to understand… “the dark side” as I suspect it is Peep’s job, or was at some point.

purplepeep said:

The leftist blogger? Delair Ali – aka founder, chief cook and bottle washer, waitstaff, busboy and janitor, DBA “Research 2000″.

The blogsite? Research 2000

Something I wasn’t aware of was the association of the founder with what appears to be the hard left.

Chap, while we agree that the poll looks to be… a poll. It’s probably reasonable to be skeptical of their research given what PurplePeep pointed out above. I’d have to look into it further, but in the polling business, an obvious and severe political bias… does not help sell your product. At least, not to most clients.

For example, lets say The Christian Coalition founders started a polling business and conducted research on abortion, family values, candidate approvals, etc. Regardless of my lean, I’d take a good hard look at their research before assigning it merit.

Pollsters are “supposed” to be above the fray. Like sportscasters, their not supposed to publicly root for a given team.

So, to use the network security analogy, I’d look at more polls from research 2000 in an attempt to discern a pattern. A single poll that’s out of whack is like seeing some port being hit on one of your public facing devices. Strikes you as odd and raises some flags, but not enough there to nail down what’s going on. So what do you do? You keep watching and dig deeper to find more anomalies.

But as I said, there’s nothing that we can see in the results or stated methodology of this poll that makes it suspect. Other than the background on the pollster, there’s no technical alarms going off.

Sorry to drag this on. But I wanted to acknowledge Peeps issue, as I understand it.

chapoutier said:
purple

Research 2000 said:
The corporate media consists of COWARDS!. Ed Murrow would be ashamed of his contemporaries today. Not only do they fail to confront this racist, they pander to him and worst of all they allow Republican law makers to pander to Limbaugh instead of confronting the law maker and asking them how they feel about the below quotes from Limbaugh and why would they want to be in the good graces of a racist?

“Down with the corporate media! Down with the Republicans!! Down with them thar wingnut talkshow hosts!!!”

(Hey, that was kinda fun. Now all gotta do is setup a DBA website, look at a few legit polls, change a few things here and there & pass it off as my own – and I’m in business!)

But the bottom line, Chappy, I’m happy you finally feel validation – honestly. Albeit it was via a strained intepration of another commenter after your cry for help. But ya gotta take your self-esteem wherever ya can find it.