Category Archives: Debate

Obama Romney debate Gallup selects town hall audience, Recent Gallup change helped Obama, Hofstra CNN Crowley Gallup bias?, October 16, 2012 debate

“I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”…George Washington

“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world but I am sure we would be getting reports from hell before breakfast.”… William Tecumseh Sherman

“The function of the press is very high. It is almost Holy.
It ought to serve as a forum for the people, through which
the people may know freely what is going on. To misstate or
suppress the news is a breach of trust.”…. Louis D. Brandeis

Anyone paying attention for years should be aware of the bias from CNN and Candy Crowley. Yesterday at Citizen Wells, the bias in favor of the LGBT community at Hofstra University was revealed.

“A cursory examination of the Hofstra University website reveals what can only be described as an inordinate emphasis on gay issues.

For example. On the first page of the scholarship opportunities we find:

“LGBT Activism Scholarship

In 2002, Hofstra University established an unprecedented scholarship program for students engaged in service to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. The program is designed to demonstrate Hofstra’s commitment to equality and support for LGBT individuals. The program also includes the Hofstra Law School Fellowships for Advocacy for the Equality of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People, as well as the Mildred Elizabeth McGinnis Endowed scholarship for students in the humanities.”

“School of Law Scholarships”

“LGBT Rights Fellowship – The Law School supports a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Fellowship for students interested in pursuing advocacy work on behalf of these communities.”

LGBT Studies.

“LGBT Studies focus on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, their history and culture, considering sexualities and genders as identities, social statuses, categories of knowledge, and as lenses that help us to frame how we understand our world. A central core of courses is complemented by interdisciplinary courses taught across campus or by specialized syllabi for students taking a course that could lend itself to LGBT studies. Currently, a minor in LGBT Studies is available as part of the Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.”

http://www.hofstra.edu/Academics/HCLAS/LGBT/index_LGBT.cfm

And last but not least.

“LGBT STUDIES PROGRAM, HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY

and

HOFSTRA CULTURAL CENTER
present
a conference

Queer Rhetoric
The 6th Annual LGBT Studies Conference

Friday and Saturday, March 16-17, 2012
Queer Rhetoric is a relatively new field situated at the intersection of LGBT Studies, Queer Theory, Rhetoric and Cultural Studies. In short, Queer Rhetoric seeks to uncover the symbolic and performative strategies whereby queer identities have been and continue to be constructed in different times and places. Scholars working in this field locate the heteronormative occlusion of queer voices within a given cultural and social context and describe how queer voices develop a battery of technologies that offer a means of resistant expression. This conference will be the first ever devoted entirely to the subject of Queer Rhetoric. For more information click here.

Keynote Addresses will be given by:
Erik Gunderson
University of Toronto, Canada
Joseph G. Astman Distinguished Symposium Scholar
The Reluctant Queerness of Ancient Rhetoric

and

Chuck E. Morris III
Boston College
Joseph G. Astman Distinguished Conference Scholar
My Old Kentucky Homo: Abraham LIncoln is Here,
Queer, and Wants to Recruit You”

https://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/obama-romney-debate-october-16-2012-hofstra-university-hempstead-ny-town-meeting-format-moderator-candy-crowley-cnn-hofstra-not-neutral-site/

Gallup is selecting the town hall meeting audience from undecided voters. Most of you are aware of the controversies surrounding polling methodologies and in many cases the skewing of results with an unrealistic representation of Democrats in the numbers. Recently Gallup changed it’s methodology midstream in the election cycle to the benefit of Obama.

From The Hill October 11, 2012.

“Obama approval rating gets a boost after Gallup tweaks its polling methodology”
“President Obama’s job approval rating spiked this month, according to Gallup’s daily tracking survey, but the jump may be the result of a shift in the polling outlet’s survey methodology.

Since late 2011, President Obama has held steady at just under 50 percent saying they approved of the job he was doing and just under 50 percent saying they disapproved.

Earlier this month, the trend line moved in favor of the president, and on Thursday it sat at 53 percent positive and 42 negative — a greater job approval rating than Obama enjoyed after the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

However, this movement may have been provoked by a change in the pollster’s methodology, without which the president may have seen no change in job approval.

“As we began this election tracking program on Oct.1, our methodologists also recommended modifying and updating several procedures,” Gallup CEO Frank Newport wrote on Wednesday.

Gallup increased the proportion of cellphones in its tracking survey from 40 percent, and now splits its calls to cellphones and land lines evenly. Newport defended the switch, saying it was an attempt to “stay consistent with changes in the communication behavior and habits of those we are interviewing.”

“Gallup switched primarily to telephone interviewing a few decades ago based on the increased penetration of phones in American households and the increased costs of going into Americans’ homes for in-person interviewing,” Newport wrote. “Now we know, based on government statistics (and what we observe around us), that Americans are shifting rapidly from reliance on landline phones to mobile devices.”

Still, the timing of the change — one month out from the presidential election — has some on the right exasperated.

“What I can say is that it’s problematic to alter one’s methodological approach to polling elections just five weeks before the biggest election in a generation,”writes Jay Cost, polling analyst for the conservative Weekly Standard. “In fact, I think this is a highly inopportune time to make such a change; do it in the summer of 2012 or the winter of 2013, but for goodness sake not the fall of 2012!”

The controversy will likely be fuel for those conservatives who claimed polls from earlier in the cycle were skewed in favor of Democrats.

The Romney campaign and other Republicans said polls showing Obama with a significant lead over their candidate were inaccurate.”

Read more:

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/261485-obama-gets-a-boost-after-gallup-tweaks-polling-methodology

It appears to me on the surface that using a higher percentage of cell phones could include more young people.

From Gallup.

Gallup polls aim to represent the opinions of a sample of people representing the same opinions that would be obtained if it were possible to interview everyone in a given country.

The majority of Gallup surveys in the U.S. are based on interviews conducted by landline and cellular telephones. Generally, Gallup refers to the target audience as “national adults,” representing all adults, aged 18 and older, living in United States.

The findings from Gallup’s U.S. surveys are based on the organization’s standard national telephone samples, consisting of directory-assisted random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone samples using a proportionate, stratified sampling design. A computer randomly generates the phone numbers Gallup calls from all working phone exchanges (the first three numbers of your local phone number) and not-listed phone numbers; thus, Gallup is as likely to call unlisted phone numbers as listed phone numbers.

Within each contacted household reached via landline, an interview is sought with an adult 18 years of age or older living in the household who has had the most recent birthday. (This is a method pollsters commonly use to make a random selection within households without having to ask the respondent to provide a complete roster of adults living in the household.) Gallup does not use the same respondent selection procedure when making calls to cell phones because they are typically associated with one individual rather than shared among several members of a household.

When respondents to be interviewed are selected at random, every adult has an equal probability of falling into the sample. The typical sample size for a Gallup poll, either a traditional stand-alone poll or one night’s interviewing from Gallup’s Daily tracking, is 1,000 national adults with a margin of error of ±4 percentage points. Gallup’s Daily tracking process now allows Gallup analysts to aggregate larger groups of interviews for more detailed subgroup analysis. But the accuracy of the estimates derived only marginally improves with larger sample sizes.

After Gallup collects and processes survey data, each respondent is assigned a weight so that the demographic characteristics of the total weighted sample of respondents match the latest estimates of the demographic characteristics of the adult population available from the U.S. Census Bureau. Gallup weights data to census estimates for gender, race, age, educational attainment, and region.”

http://www.gallup.com/poll/101872/how-does-gallup-polling-work.aspx