Submitted by John Spencer Yantiss, Sep 13, 2008 05:12

What we least need is more "statistics," more polls, which demonstrate nothing. Those who conduct them, and those who pay attention to them are engaging in numerical palm readings. The saddest aspect of learning from history is that, by and large, no one does. Amazingly, conservative journalists fail just as miserably as do their liberal counterparts, to note the egregious forecasts based on polls, beginning with the famous, but forgotten, Truman vs. Dewey contest. In the early and mid 1980s, when I was in college for the first time, a vast majority of youth were pro-Reagan, very conservative (something the hate-screaming, liberal, youth of today would do well to discover by doing a little true research). Still they did not make a meaningful difference in the election. I ran to the voting booth to register my approval of Reagan, and found very few of my fellow students, and the voting results numbers validated my own observations. When will politicians and journalists stop attempting to prophesy elections? Obviously never, though their predictions are less accurate than the corner palm reader's.

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