Do prognosticators and the pollsters influence the way people vote?

Question

I need to write a 3 page paper on this!!!

Answer 1

Any person or every factor affects the way people vote.

Answer 2

Only if people are stupid enough to let them; and unfortunately, most are just that stupid.

Answer 3

Unfortunately they do.  Its too bad people can vote according to the candidates record, ideology and platform, but will be swayed by straw polls, exit polls, blogs and other c**p.

Answer 4

Whether it's called "herd mentality" or "tipping point", people are influenced by what they perceive to be the opinions of others, especially a "majority". Whether true or not, if a pollster says that many people believe "X", then "X" has more credibility than if it had to stand on its own merits.

This is why each campaign pretends to greater voter and financial support than it has. No one wants to contribute to a campaign that has no money but many are motivated to contribute when it "appears" that there is plenty of money.

Check out references to how many Muslims there are in the U.S. They pretend to numbers vastly greater than census records would say. Check out Zogby polls, as well. The Zogby of the polling company is the brother of the Zogby who is head of a Muslim organization.

There is plenty of room for slanting results by bias in questioning and in choice of samples. They make enough mistakes inadvertently and these tend to obscure more deliberate attempts to bias the results. In the infamous 2000 election in Florida, what is not often mentioned is that many voters in the Panhandle, which was more conservative than the rest of Florida, didn't bother to vote in the late hours because it was erroneously said that Gore had won Florida. The contested margin was <1000 votes but it has been conservatively estimate that >10000 votes were lost to the Bush side by this bias, and that bias was inadvertent since it depended on actual votes. Polling is much less reliable and occurs at a time different from that one day when opinions really count, i.e. when the votes are actually cast.