I know I’m late getting to this, but I think it’s important to highlight because newspaper and TV reports will continue to cite this AP poll for the next week or so. The poll would appear to indicate that Bush’s recent resurgence in the polls has hit a wall. But Ankle Biting Pundits found that Democrats made up 52 percent of the sample, while Republicans made up only 40 percent.
We all know that the media are going to gloss over the problems in these polls because they don’t really care. As long as the polls help them fill news hole with, to borrow from James Fallows, “pointless predictions,” so what if they’re wrong? They don’t really face any consequences. But it makes less sense for liberals to seize upon these poll results as real representations of public opinion, which they have done. Why? Because they’re just fooling themselves:
There was another reason, though, why hundreds of thousands of liberals around the country found themselves addictively checking and rechecking Daily Kos as the 2004 election approached. It made them think Democrats were going to win. Moulitsas wasn’t just posting any polls, he was selecting those that suggested Democrats