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Gallup Denies Skewing Results

Kerry-Edwards Poll 'Bounce'
Stubborn as 'My Pet Goat?'

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A Fleet Center Enema

The Gallup organization today denied that its most recent poll showing the Kerry-Edwards organization received no “bounce” from the Democratic Convention was based primarily on a survey of those who had checked out My Pet Goat from their local library.

Democrats have charged that the once-reliable survey may have been skewed by so-called “national security” tactics used by the Bush administration.

Democrats immediately pointed to data in the poll that showed Bush is “capable of reading a book.” The results may have been the result of already GOP-inclined voters who saw Bush reading My Pet Goat as planes targeted the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. “These are Republicans who were looking for something good to take away about George W. Bush while watching Fahrenheit 911, “ a Democratic Party spokesman told reporters. “The fact that George W. Bush was capable of reading, energized them.”

Attorney General John Ashcroft has repeatedly denied that the Justice Department has ever invoked its new right under the Patriot Act to survey the reading habits of public library users. Still, he says, he would be more lenient with one of the potential 174, 436 terrorists who have read My Pet Goat than the 322,126 potential terrorists who have read Howard Dean’s Winning Back America.

Democrats released their own poll today showing that not only that Kerry will carry Crawford, Texas, but that more than 80 percent of the residents would like George W. Bush to find a new place for his ranch. “Perhaps he could share retirement stories with Saddam Hussein somewhere in the South of Iraq,” one of Bush’s disgruntled neighbors in Crawford suggested.

Historians were quick to point out that sometimes polls are flawed because of certain assumptions. In 1936, a national telephone poll found Alf Landon easily defeating Franklin Roosevelt. After Roosevelt’s landslide victory, pollsters discovered that telephones were still a rich man’s toy. In the 1980’s, Tom Bradley, a very successful African mayor of Los Angeles, led his Republican rival in all the polls throughout two campaigns. In both cases, he lost in a general election where Californians didn’t discover their racism until they marked their secret ballot.

“Predicting elections is not exactly an exact science like predicting your local weather,” says a Gallup official, “In fact, one of our recent polls show that 85 percent of those who believe in their local weather forecasts, also believe George W. Bush when he says the economy is turning around.”

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