So says at least one person, per this article from Jim Galloway in the AJC’s Political Insider.
Mark Twain divided falsehoods into three categories: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Had he lived to see them, Twain might have added a fourth: Public opinion polls.
Atlanta has two political polling firms that routinely tell us who is ahead this race or that, whether for mayor of Atlanta or governor.
Front-running candidates often use numbers generated by these companies to raise campaign cash. Journalists sometimes use the same statistics to help determine which candidates are worth their time.
One of these survey companies, Republican-oriented Strategic Visions LLC, has just finished a very bad week.
The firm was censured by a national organization of pollsters. And Nate Silver, a prominent political statistician, publicly suggested, in a series of posts on his much-read blog, fivethirtyeight.com, that Strategic Vision might be making up its results.
A clearly exhausted David Johnson, CEO of seven-year-old Strategic Vision, on Friday called the intimations libelous. “We categorically deny it. And yes, we are going to be taking legal action,” he said.
