Earlier today, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com completed an interview with a man named John Ziegler, who is responsible for commissioning the poll of Obama supporters conducted by Zogby this past week. In the interview, Ziegler responds to a steady stream of completely straight-forward questions by becoming increasingly enraged and revealing himself to be a moron. Details below.
Ziegler had contacted Nate, and while I don't want to give away all of FiveThirtyEight's hard-earned traffic, here are two highlights from the must-read interview:
NS: Why would you commission a survey question with no correct response?
JZ: The purpose of the question, you pinhead, was we wanted to determine the Tina Fey Effect.
NS: Were the interviews conducted by telephone or online?
JZ: How can you ask a question like that and pretend that you have any clue what you're writing about! That's unbelievable that someone could write what you did! That is unbelievable that you wouldn't know that it's a telephone or an online poll and that you went on my summaries of the questions before the questions were even released!
NS: We’ve heard reports from our readers that very similar questions had been asked in an online format. There was no online component at all?
JZ: That is correct, which you would have known if you had looked at the information. Before you called this a push poll -- you don't seem to know the definition of a push poll. How do you have this website?
Ziegler, like an especially clueless understudy of Bill O'Reilly, takes on Nate over questions that were meant to provide context to the poll, as if they were devious. His aggressive paranoia immediately undermines his credibility.
My favorite response:
NS: Do you think that certain types of voters are less well informed?
JZ: I think anyone that looks rationally at these poll results would have to conclude that Obama voters are incredibly poorly informed about major issues that occurred during the campaign -- my guess is because McCain voters got their information from different types of media than Obama voters did.
If you ask all your questions from the viewpoint of Fox News, and then find that a bunch of people who don't watch Fox News don't know most of the answers, what are you really proving? If I were to ask McCain supporters how many times Fred Thompson stuttered in his RNC convention speech, they probably wouldn't know that answer unless they watched Keith Olbermann and MSNBC for the convention.
If nothing else, this complete tool reveals that supporters of the two parties have very different sets of operational "facts" that make up their views of the campaign, because our entire news culture has evolved to cater to like-minded partisans. This is a serious issue, but this GOP mouth-breather seems completely unaware of what the real issue is.
As far as his conclusion, call up random people in the phone book until you find 10 Obama supporters and 10 McCain supporters. Then give them all an IQ test. Game, set and match for the Democrats.