Pollsters Have Egg On Their Faces

From Newsmax ~ The presidential election was a sharp setback both for the GOP and for the major national pollsters who saw their gloom-and-doom predictions of a double-digit drubbing blow up in their faces.

Only Pew, Rasmussen Got It Right

The pollsters will have some explaining to do in the election aftermath, after several predicted the McCain-Palin ticket would lose by almost twice the actual margin.

Sen. Barack Obama's victory over Sen. John McCain clearly is one of historic dimensions. His victory marked the first time since the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter that a Democratic candidate for president captured more than 50 percent of the vote. Obama garnered 62.5 million votes — 52 percent of the vote — compared with McCain's 55.5 million 46 percent, respectively.

Yet the predictions of Gallup and Reuters/C-Span that Obama had an 11 percent margin never materialized. The results were clearly beyond the polls' margin of error.

Other polls, including ABC/Washington Post and CBS, had showed Obama with a 9-point margin. Even the RealClearPolitics "poll of polls," an average of 15 national polls, showed Obama ahead by 7.5 points.

"One thing is clear at this point," Newsmax columnist Dick Morris reported just before 9 p.m. on Tuesday. "The polls were wrong!"

Obama, Morris predicted, "is not winning by the margins the polls predicted."

Some GOP pundits, pointing to polling errors that favored Democrats in 2000 and 2004, warned before the election that the Obama campaign was using inflated numbers to make the election’s outcome appear inevitable, dampening enthusiasm and support for McCain in the closing days of the campaign and reducing GOP voter turnout.

That the race was actually much closer than most of polls indicated explains the furious pace of campaigning by Obama and McCain right up to Election Day.

The polls that emerged as the most accurate: The Pew Research and Rasmussen polls that showed the race precisely at 52 to 46.

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