Journalist Alexander Burns; Writing in Politico (\"The

¶ … journalist Alexander Burns; writing in Politico ("The GOP polling debacle") he insists that the "…worst parts of the GOP's 2012 trouncing was that they didn't see it coming" (Burns, 2012, p. 1).

Was the reporting clear and accurate, with sufficient depth and breadth? The reporting in this article was very through; in fact the data presented was focused on specific public opinion polls that preceded the recent presidential election. The polling numbers were broken down to show that certain candidates that were trailing in polls actually won their specific offices by several points.

For example, the McLaughlin & Associates poll showed that U.S. Representative Tim Bishop (Democrat, New York) was trailing by 5 points in mid-October, Burns explains. But Bishop "…won by just over 4 points," which indicates either the polling data was wrong (that is, not enough people were interviewed or a biased group of people were interviewed) or Bishop suddenly got real popular and turned the election around by 8 points. The logic here, according to Burns, is that the polling was inaccurate.

"Multiple Republican pollsters… acknowledged that they misjudged how many young people and minorities would show up to vote," Burns explains on page 2. Democrats had pointed out for months leading up to the voting that "…Republican polling was screening out voters who would ultimately turn up to support Obama," Burns points out (p. 2).

Were some facts reported and other facts ignored? There are facts that could have been added to this story; for example, in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states Republican governors and legislatures tried to stop early voting -- and in some cases they succeeded. Why try to stop early voting? It is well-known that older people and minorities (typically these groups are Democrats) are the ones who vote early. When large numbers of Democrats were willing to wait in line up to 8 hours in order to vote, that wasn't taken into account by the polls.

Did the story consider alternative perspectives and worldviews? Yes, in fact Burns pointed out the viewpoints of both Democrats and Republicans when it came to explaining how the GOP pollsters could have missed the mark by such large margins. Some GOP pollsters were frankly angry at the situation: "There were just too many damn Democrats," said one pollster. Burns points out that Democrats "…appear to have more or less nailed the racial composition and age distribution of the 2012 electorate… while Republicans did not" (Burns, p. 4).

Were there any questionable assumptions implicit in the story? No, it was a straight-forward recap of the post-election responses to polling. The one possible exception to that last sentence is that there was speculation that Romney was a "weak" candidate and all the polling and prognostication couldn't pull him through since Obama came across as a stronger candidate. But that was pure political conjecture and not based on polling data or misread polling data.

Were any implications ignored while others were emphasized? The news article was directed specifically at the results of the election juxtaposed with the various polls that were published prior to election day. Of course the article could have gone into the reason why such a huge number of Latino voters chose Obama and not Romney. Clearly, there have been proposals on immigration by Republicans that were mean-spirited and even draconian, and Latinos read the papers and listen to the news so they were not about to vote for a party they believe hates them or wants those here illegally to be deported back to Mexico.