YES VIRGINIA - you have to have faith in the media when it comes to polls**

Would you believe it? We once again see the media owned polls attempting to swing elections ?( in Virginia USA) and telling us that Labor could win an early election in Australia,

?The independent Real Clear Politics compendium of different polls has a range of nearly 10% points in the media’s reports on the candidates they support. USA TODAY/ Suffolk has the Democrat on 46 to 45, The conservative Emerson has it as a 49:49 tie and the liberal leaning Washington Post calls it for the Republican 53:45. The average of the top few polls shows that McAulliffe has his nose ahead on the day the nation stops in its tracks on the first week of November but may well rely upon the level of early voting in that State.

Politico reports that the latest polling indicates an extremely competitive contest between the two candidates in a state that contributed to the election of President Biden. Youngkin is said to hold an 18 point lead among self-identified independents who have been losing faith in the "divided democrats" who are seen to be unable to back their nominal leader.

?Eric Nielsen, Senior Director of Media Strategies, The Gallup Organization says “It is important in a random sample that everyone in the population being studied has an equal chance of participating. Otherwise, the results could be biased and, therefore, not representative of the population”

FOX?is telling its audience that Candidate Glenn Youngkin (the Trump party candidate) with an eight-point margin over Governor Terry McAuliffe (The Biden party candidate). It suggests that Youngkin will easily tip out the incumbent candidate this week.

Fox made this call based on 1,212 interviews in the dying weeks of the campaign among a random sample of registered voters contacted on landlines (310) and cellphones (902) avoiding the opinions of electors who don’t have or don’t answer surveys unless they are live-at-home interviews.

The Fox News Poll (conducted under the joint direction with Beacon Research ) selected telephone numbers from a statewide voter file of registered Virginia voters using a probability proportionate to size method, which means phone numbers are proportionally representative to the number of voters in all regions across the state.

The polling average in the Virginia governor's race since the end of August. You'll see that McAuliffe's edge has gone from about 5 points in late August to 3 points in late September to a tie today -- in other words, slow but clear movement toward Youngkin. This has come as President Joe Biden's approval rating has dropped precipitously both nationally and in Virginia.

Polling averages in Virginia governor's race since the end of August 2021 have gone from McAuliffe's edge of about 5 points in late August to 3 points in late September --to a tie today -- in other words as the media stories get closer to the only poll that actually (sic) counts, their support for their candidate gets closer to their preferred result.

Before anyone gets carried away thinking that the media owners such as Bezos and Murdoch are trying to rig the results, let’s be clear they know that these are consistent method errors that have consistently distorted?“the will of the people”.

Before 2008, Republicans had the upper hand. No competitive state shifted more towards the Democratic party during the Obama and Trump eras than Virginia, spurred by population growth in the DC Metro area and a tectonic shift in college-educated white voters away from the Republican party.

This year’s surveys incorporated methodological changes aimed at addressing challenges in achieving a representative sample of Virginians — challenges that were made clear in the 2020 presidential election, when state-level polls across the industry had the highest error in at least 20 years, according to a report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research . The Post’s polls that year had a mixed record, accurately estimating support for Joe Biden and President Donald Trump in some states, including Virginia , but overestimating Biden’s support elsewhere.

When polls are completed, the partisan makeup of the sample was compared with the database of all voters and then weighted so that the proportion of Democratic, Republican and unknown party voters matched the Virginia electorate as a whole. That was in addition to weighting adjustments for other demographics.

Even the pro-Republican Washington Post (Scott Clement, the polling director for Bezos allingned Washington Post) says the result is an even bet with both candidates on a 50:50 split due to?“differential nonresponse” – people who don’t count because they fail to respond to phone-based survey. The Washington Post-Schar School poll was conducted by telephone calls with 1,107registered voters and 918 likely voters. The sample was drawn from a combination of voter registration-based sampling and random sampling of Virginia phone numbers. Overall, 73% of respondents were reached on cellphones and 27% on landlines.

Watch the papers this week for the “post-hoc’ rationalisations for shoddy survey methods and lack of transparency. Yes Virginia*. there is always a Santa Claus when it comes down to the media pushing their beliefs.**

**Footnotes:

*A note on the most widely read article in the history of print media. 'Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus'?is a well-known editorial that appeared in?The Sun?newspaper in New York on 21 September 1897. The editorial was a reply to a letter written to the newspaper by an eight-year-old girl,?Virginia O'Hanlon,?asking whether Santa Claus really existed. Virginia's father, Dr O’Hanlon, suggested she write to?The Sun,?a prominent New York City newspaper at the time because, he told her,?'If you see it in The Sun, it's so.'

**In Australia there has been consistent obfuscation by the media owned polls, even after predicting a Shorten win in the election in which masses of public funds were converted from sports rorts and regional announcements into a “Miracle Win” for a government behind in the media owned polls. These pollsters refused to assist in a review of their sampling or post-polling changes to their samples. We need a nationally owned, independent research company other than Roy Morgan Research that has Labor ahead in this year's polls.