We'll Find the Bounce We Expect

My friendly neighborhood troll has rebutted the unequivocal criminal conduct of warrantless spying in the White House by selectively mentioning a Washington Post poll that wasn't even in the field when the story broke. What that has to do with criminal conduct in the White House is beyond me, but I expect it was just a typical contrarian attempt to muddy the waters.

Now, via a WaPo chat yesterday, the poll editor, Richard Morin, basically admits his own bias. He was asked a question about the discrepency between his poll, which showed a 5-point uptick for Bush (and it had a 5-point uptick in GOP party ID as well; what dovetailing!) and a more recent Gallup poll, which showed no movement:

Which brings me to this point. Gallup does terrific work. But I found it odd that they had Bush at 41 immeidately after the Iraq elections--down insignificantly from 42 in their pre-election poll. Bush didn't benefit--even a little bit--from the success of those elections and the favorable media coverage that followed? Certainly possible, but I find it hard to believe.

I don't really post about polls all that much. And when a polling editor announces that he was expecting Bush's numbers to go up before he took his poll, and then his numbers do go up, more than any other contemporary poll out there (except Hotline, widely seen as an outlier), I know why I don't post about polls all that much. They don't mean a whole heck of a lot, and they mean even less when they're as irretrievably biased as this one. You can get the numbers you want out of a poll in a myriad of ways.

Chris Bowers has more, including how angry Morin got after being asked why his polling outfit didn't ask a question about impeachment. Amusing.

UPDATE: This maroon apparently polled the impeachment question with regard to Clinton and Monica within five days of the revelation. Nowadays the very specter of the word makes him madder still. Water-carrier, thy name is Richard Morin.