BHS - 8A – Truth about Election Polling | 'Do They Have a Case' w/ Wayne Resnick - podcast episode cover

BHS - 8A – Truth about Election Polling | 'Do They Have a Case' w/ Wayne Resnick

Oct 28, 202425 min
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

The truth about polling. ‘Do They Have a Case’ with Wayne Resnick.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

You're listen Saints KFI AM six forty, the Bill Handles show on demand on the iHeartRadio FFI Handle here and the Morning Crew. It is a Monday morning, October twenty eighth. Week from tomorrow is the presidential election. Man, it is going to be just insane this year, I mean beyond insane. To give you an example, I'm going to talk more about this in the next day or two. To give you an example, over one hundred lawsuits have already been filed.

Speaker 2

In this presidential election.

Speaker 1

Can you imagine what's going to happen at the end of the election.

Speaker 2

We're not going to know for several days who wins or not. Tell you one thing, we know for a.

Speaker 1

Fact that well, I know for a fact Donald Trump will not accept. If Kamala Harris wins, simply will not accept it. Is there a chance that she's not going to accept? Smaller And I just can't wait for this thing to blow up. And I'm going to talk about it. I think tomorrow we're going to talk about what are the possibilities, and I'm going to talk about Halloween coming up. But first let's talk about polling, because all this week we're going to pay attention to the polls, and here

are the perception about polls and models of polling. These are raw snapshots of public opinion.

Speaker 2

This is what it is.

Speaker 1

Here's what happened yesterday when a recent poll was taken.

Speaker 2

Well, those aren't snapshots.

Speaker 1

That's simply false because the data, real data, is massaged based on possibly reasonable results, just judgments made by polsters and forecasting stages who interpret and adjust the numbers before presenting them to the public. And this happens all the time, where you have these numbers that are looked at and then they are massage.

Speaker 2

You don't get raw numbers.

Speaker 1

What we yet numbers after the pollsters have done their polling, have done the questioning. Then we have to look at what was the question, how was it asked, who answered it, and try to break that down, break that down demographically.

Speaker 2

So it's become really difficult.

Speaker 1

Even sampling random sampling in the digital age have become very difficult, even more so, which means that without the corrections they put in there, the numbers wouldn't be representative. And therefore everything that's representative or everything that's told to us includes a margin for error, right plus plus or minus three points. Well, we really don't know. We have no idea. What we do see is the end product.

For example, let's say Donald Trump in one of the battleground states has fifty point two percent, not fifty point three percent. Fifty point two percent. What the hell does that mean? Does that mean that's his chance of winning the presidency? Fifty point two with a three percent margin of error? Okay, that's nothing. So these you think, then therefore forty seven to fifty one or forty eight to fifty one, Therefore it's a real number.

Speaker 2

It is not. It gives us an impression of certainty. There is no certainty. Now. Early American polls, I'm gonna give you a little bit of.

Speaker 1

History here, were completely unscientific, but you look at them and you go, wow, they were right on. For example, earliest part of the twentieth century, there was a magazine called The Literary Digest, which sent sample ballots to millions of its readers. That's how they would figure out to its readers. And to give you an idea of how

many people sent those ballots. By the way, the magazine correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election from nineteen sixteen to nineteen thirty six, and this is just sending out sample ballots. And in thirty six Franklin Roosevelt ran against alf Landon and the Digests sent out ten million sample batlets and receive two point four million back. This is a response rate of twenty four percent. Today, if polsters get a two percent response rate, that's considered insanely good.

Twenty four percent. So based on those here's what the Digest predicted. FDR would receive forty one percent of the vote and he would be slaughtered by alf Landon. Instead of forty one percent of the vote, FDR gets sixty one percent of the vote. It was a land slide, I mean a massive landslide.

Speaker 2

So why what happened? Why did the poll fail?

Speaker 1

Well, here's who they here's who answered the polls, and here's who read the Digest.

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker 1

They got their people from directories of automobile and telephone ownership during the depression. Guests who owned telephones and cars during the depression wealthy people. Matter of fact, during the Depression,

there were people didn't have electricity. This is when the Tennessee Valley Authority, established by FDR, electrified the entire Tennessee Valley, which had no electricity, and so what happened was land and supporters were far more likely to send back their samples and FDR reporters, making the poll not just completely useless but wildly misleading.

Speaker 2

And because of that you had more scientific.

Speaker 1

Polls that were created, like the one that was neered by George Gallup. And we're gonna look at poles all week, and we think that polls within the margin three points up or down are legitimate, which means that everything is there dead heat right now. But the reality is polls aren't really that scientific, even though they're getting more and more scientific. So the logic of quote a scientific poll

is pretty straightforward. You get a truly random sample from a broad range of the population in which every person has about an equally likely chance of being included.

Speaker 2

In the poll. Then you pull the stats out.

Speaker 1

Obviously, if you've got one hundred million voters or one hundred and fifty million voters, you can't very well poll one hundred and fifty million people, so you.

Speaker 2

Pull a sampling.

Speaker 1

And here is the scary part which I've never understood. The pollsters tell us, if a poll is done well, you can get a legitimate poll with about twelve hundred respondents.

Speaker 2

The way Nielsen.

Speaker 1

Works in terms of for example, television, right, Let's say you have one hundred million people or one hundred and twenty million people watching television on a given night. They'll ask twelve hundred people what they're watching, and based on that, you now have a show that is number one or number forty five.

Speaker 2

And you go, that's crazy. Well that's what they say.

Speaker 1

It's significant if it's truly a random samples. However, how do you get them? Okay, telephone book and you call them, or you have a voter registration the roles of voter registration. I know people that will not register to vote because they don't want to be on jury duty, which means they're never going.

Speaker 2

To be asked. How many of those does that skew the poll could be? And how about those that say it's a telephone.

Speaker 1

You're looking at a phone now that they're done on cell phones, you don't see the number.

Speaker 2

Are you gonna answer the poll? No, because you're gonna recognize the number. You're not going to answer the phone. When I answer the phone and it's a polster, I go, I'm not interested in taking the poll.

Speaker 1

It takes too long, not interested, and so the numbers are completely skewed.

Speaker 2

And here's one, here's a great one.

Speaker 1

There was a study out of the University College London and tested various methods found in eighty two percent of participants in a survey lied about themselves to either get into the poll because it makes them feel important, or to get paid. And they do pay a small amount of money. I think the radio pollsters, don't they, Neil, you were involved in that for a peer time when

you were in management looking at the ratings. Weren't people in the days we had diaries, people would write down Because we didn't have the technology, people just write down what they wrote.

Speaker 2

I don't know that we're allowed to talk about it, quite honestly.

Speaker 1

I'm talking about history. Are we not allowed to talk about what happened historically?

Speaker 2

All right? I'll give it to you. All right.

Speaker 1

So here's the bottom line, based on information that KFI has gotten scientifically. Nobody listens to this show, but thank you very much for not listening.

Speaker 2

Am I allowed to say that, Neil?

Speaker 1

Does it matter if I say yes or no what you're going to say? And the other thing that happens in polling and I'll finish up with this to give you an idea of just how weird it is. Different demographics have different weights. What does waiting mean based on the fact that certain group of people respond to polls in different percentages? For example, what they go after White people they respond in x percent. Hispanics respond fewer that are asked for the polling.

Speaker 2

They're weighted more.

Speaker 1

In other words, you have fifty whites, they are weighted less than fifty Hispanics because the Hispanics.

Speaker 2

I'm just throwing something out. It's not necessarily Hispanics or anything.

Speaker 1

But just different demographics are weighted differently, where the numbers may point out to one thing, but the waiting is different.

Speaker 2

Waiting weight like in weights. And so this whole thing is so difficult to understand.

Speaker 1

It's so there's so statistics involved, so many statistics involved, that the world of polling is so insanely complicated. Oh here's the other thing. How about this. Every campaign has their own pollsters. There are Democratic pollsters that work for the Democratic Party, and there are Republican polsters that work for the Republican Party. And the best story about polling is, I think who I'm trying to remember who The pollster

was for Jimmy Carter. But over the weekend he told Jimmy Carter was in pretty good shape with Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 2

Polling wise, it was pretty close. And it all collapsed over the weekend.

Speaker 1

Before the vote, and he had to tell Jimmy Carter, you're going to lose the race.

Speaker 2

And Carter wouldn't believe him.

Speaker 1

He said, look at my look at what's going on. You know, look at how close we are. And the pollster said, uh uh, your polls.

Speaker 2

Are collapsing, and he was right, So there are. And I don't know why I threw that in there. It's just a great little bit of history. I wanted to share with you. But as we look at the polls, keep in mind.

Speaker 1

That, yeah, well they can be wrong big time. Look at the polls that were with Look at Hillary versus Donald Trump in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2

I'm the one that says she's gonna win. Look at the poles she's gonna win.

Speaker 1

Look at the polls, and the last minute it turned around for a whole bunch of reasons.

Speaker 2

All Right, we're gonna talk more.

Speaker 1

About the polls coming up over this path over this next week, because well this election is completely completely insane. And this is when it's a good thing to be involved in the world of talk on radio because we get to play with this thing like very few people do. All right, hey, why don't we do this? Do they have a case with Wayne and me? Wayne, just go right into it.

Speaker 2

Yes, we have.

Speaker 3

You're gonna love this case. Two law firms. Learner and Row is one of them. The other one is the Accidental Law Group. Didn't they write a musical Learner in Row, great musician? Most one of them did. Okay, So the Accident Law Group engages in what's called conquesting. This is where you buy a search term on Google in the name of your competitor, so that when people search for your competitor, they will be directed first in the search results to your website. And this is what the Accident

Law Group did. They bought Learner and Row as a search term. Now, of course, Learner and Row is trademarked by Learner and Row, so as you might imagine, Learner and Row said, uh, we are suing you for trademarked infringement, violating the Lanham Act and the Accident And one thing you should know about conquesting is in and of itself,

it's totally legal and it is quite common. So the Accident Law Group says, we have done nothing wrong because, yes, it's true, when people search for you, they're the first search result is US.

Speaker 2

That's true.

Speaker 3

But once they click on us, we in No, it's very clear it's us.

Speaker 2

It's very clear it's not you. It's very clear it's us.

Speaker 3

Therefore, there is no consumer confusion, and you must have consumer confusion to be in violation of the Lanham Act and have a trademark claim. So the lower court says, yeah, I mean, it's maybe underhanded in some way, but it's not illegal. So Learner and Row go up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and so what do you think about this? That is, if the resulting website does not in any way misrepresent itself.

Speaker 1

This gets really interesting because there's a couple points here I want to bring up.

Speaker 2

It certainly has.

Speaker 1

A smell test issue where it appears underhanded and sleezy, and they're not even saying it's not underhanded and sleazy. What it is is it's not confusing, and the law does not prohibit us from doing that. One of the things the court could say, is there's no violation here, and if Congress wants to pass something that is violative of law, pass the law that says you cannot do that, and that.

Speaker 2

Would be the easiest way out. I am, Oh, it's interesting which way I'm going to argue.

Speaker 1

I think their argument that it is not confusing and confusion has to be an issue. I think that that is going to prevail, even though it is the sleaziest underhanded thing.

Speaker 2

It has happened to me.

Speaker 1

By the way, just to let you know, you've gone there are places where my name has been and it immediately goes to a law firm that you know, I have nothing to do with, and they do things that I go, what are you doing? And they that's exactly what they did. Now you know, was there any confusion, Well, yeah, there's all kinds of confusion confusing me with the law in any way that's legitimate.

Speaker 2

I get that. But I think what the court said, and this is.

Speaker 1

I think they went on the language of the statute that did not make that any kind of violation and agree that it was horrible. And I would say they said, if Congress wants to change it, they can change it.

Speaker 2

That's my take on that what happened? All right, that's pretty good.

Speaker 3

Now I'm going to give you just a statistic here from the case, because, as you know, Learner and Row

would have to prove there was confusion. So they were able to get one hundred and nine thousand, three hundred and twenty two specific times that somebody searched for Learner and Row and instead ended up at an alg website, and in two hundred and thirty six of those instances, the caller mentioned Learner in Row even though they were talking to Accident Law Group, which is a zero point two one percent of the total number of consumers that were conquested.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that makes good.

Speaker 3

You feel stronger that there was not really actionable confusion.

Speaker 1

Yeah. I think that's a good argument, saying there were so few that uh, and that's the only data out there.

Speaker 2

There were so few that were that actually were confused.

Speaker 1

Uh. We were voting or were ruling in favor of Learner and Learner and Low who wrote South Pacific.

Speaker 3

It's actually Accident Law Group that wins. They're the conquests, right.

Speaker 2

That's what I That's what I basically didn't I say that that's.

Speaker 3

Exactly what you wanted to make your your Learner and Low jokes.

Speaker 2

So yeah, that's what I say against.

Speaker 3

Learner and Low, who wrote so many beautiful musicals. Yeah all right, all right, well you got that one right.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's and that's a that's a little wonky and really interesting.

Speaker 2

This is what I love about this segment is you come up with these.

Speaker 3

Cases, have you made sure that you have purchased or the people behind Handle on the Law have purchased Handle on the Law on Google? Have you purchased Yeah, I have Bill Handles show podcast on Google.

Speaker 2

Yes, yes, somebody else.

Speaker 1

And the point is that none of that is a referral service, and it goes to referral services that are other people. And yeah, it's just really sleazy, to say the least.

Speaker 3

Okay, guys walking down the street with some friends celebrating his birthday. There's some street musicians playing in a parking lot, so this group stops to listen to the street musicians, and here comes Sergeant Reginald Beasley Detroit p D, who, for reasons that may never be known, is walking past them with a couple of other officers and says to these four people who are standing on the sidewalk watching

the musicians and I'll have to censor it. But he goes, he just walks by and he goes keep that ass moving. So the birthday boy engages him in a little conversation about like why are you talking to us like that? And then Sergeant Beasley says, you need to keep moving. So the birthday boy says, what why why can't we just stand on the sidewalk, And then Sergeant Beasley says, you have five seconds to get moving, and the birthday

boy says, or what? And then Sergeant Beasley goes five four, three and on two, grabs the guy's arm and pulls his handcuffs out with the other hand, which is not fair because he said the guy had to the count of five. So one of the friends grabs the guy. Here the plaintiff grabs his arm, pulls him away, walks him away from Sergeant Beasley, and then the birthday Boy's girlfriend comes over to him and they're you know, she's

trying to like, hey man, let's not cause a scene whatever. Meanwhile, Sergeant Beasley has decided it's taser time, so he pulls out his taser.

Speaker 2

He's pointing it at these two.

Speaker 3

The girlfriend has her arms around her boyfriend a hug. Now, I know you don't like hugs bill generally speaking, but this sergeant apparently didn't like other people hugging. So while the girlfriend is hugging her boyfriend, whose back is turned to the sergeant, Sergeant Beasley tases him right in the back, and then they're both arrested for a resisting arrest. Now, they actually went to a trial and were acquitted.

Speaker 2

How it comes? How does the prosecution even go there?

Speaker 1

I mean, based on what you said, and then there are witnesses and I don't even see how that's going there.

Speaker 3

Well, probably because Sergeant Beasley's side of the story is that the birthday boy was resisting arrest.

Speaker 2

Okay, but why was he being arrested? You got me? Okay.

Speaker 3

This is now the lawsuit against sergeant Beasley for excessive force. He wants qualified immunity. I didn't violate anybody's constitutional right. He was resisting arrest, so I tasted him, I'll have you know. And this will probably wrap up the presentation. The law in the Sixth Circuit is an officer can taste somebody if they're actively resisting arrest, which requires violence or a show of force or hostile language, coupled with failing to comply with an officer's commands.

Speaker 2

If it is.

Speaker 3

Passive resistance, you are not allowed to tasee somebody. So, hearing what happened and Sergeant Beasley saying I should get qualified immunity because he was actively resisting arrest, what do you think the Sixth Circuit did, given the description of the facts that I've just given you.

Speaker 2

Okay, unless this is a trick question, no, I promise you, I don't in my pocket.

Speaker 1

I don't see how he could would be able to claim immunity, not only based on the facts as you describe him, but let's say there actually was some kind of.

Speaker 2

A basis of immunity, something you could hang your hat on.

Speaker 1

In the most minor way, Beasley's acts were so egregious that even if qualified immunity would somehow connect in the most minor way, he's gone beyond the pale in terms of the egregiousness factor. So I think, I mean, that's that's an easy one. I don't see how he could possibly prevail one.

Speaker 3

Of course, no, theF the officer now will face a lawsuit for excessive force.

Speaker 2

And how does he stay a lot.

Speaker 1

How does he stay at an officer under those circumstances?

Speaker 3

Now you know there's there are police officers who are adjudicated against and stay on the force.

Speaker 2

I mean, we don't at this point.

Speaker 3

We don't know right now the lawsuit goes forward, we don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 2

We don't know what the Detroit PD is going to do.

Speaker 3

But these people who were just trying to enjoy a birthday were really put through a lot of Hell.

Speaker 1

Yeah, immediately when you said it's taser time, I was thinking of mc hammer and.

Speaker 2

The cops starting to dance around it's taser time.

Speaker 1

All right, We'll talk again next week at eight point thirty once again. Thanks way, all right, that's it, We're done, guys. Tomorrow morning we start all over again at five am wake up call with Amy and then Neil and I come aboard and we go through the show until right about now and tomorrow I'm gonna do the story of the the apples with the razor blades in them for Halloween?

Speaker 2

How true?

Speaker 1

And did I really get in trouble when I tried that a couple of years ago. I will come back and you will to coming up.

Speaker 2

What are we going to do? I don't know. We'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1

Everybody KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.

Speaker 2

You've been listening to The Bill Handle Show.

Speaker 1

Catch My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android