POLL: AMERICANS EVENLY DIVIDED OVER WHICH POLL THEY BELIEVE Gallup, Zogby in Statistical Dead Heat
Americans are evenly divided over which presidential election poll they believe, with the Gallup poll and the Zogby poll drawing roughly the same number of likely voters, a new poll of likely voters reveals.
In the poll, taken by the University of Minnesota's Institute for Public Opinion, 48% said they believed the Gallup poll and 47% trusted Zogby, a statistical dead heat, says Dr. Davis Bevins, who supervised the survey for the Institute.
"With just two weeks to go until the election, neither Gallup nor Zogby has broken out," Dr. Bevins says. "It is really too close to call."
Perhaps in response to the ever-tightening race between the rival polling companies, the competition between Gallup and Zogby has grown increasingly nasty in recent days, with both companies airing expensive negative television ads attacking each other.
In one particularly vicious attack ad, Gallup accused Zogby of "flip-flopping" on whether Sen. John Kerry or President Bush was ahead in the race.
But Zogby soon retaliated with an attack ad of its own, accusing Gallup of having a lesbian daughter.
For his part, Dr. Bevins warns that the accuracy of his own poll may be suspect since the voters in the survey were contacted exclusively by phone: "We find that a lot of people are unwilling to answer the phone these days because they're afraid it might be Bill O'Reilly."
Elsewhere, election officials in Florida said that they have encountered a new problem with their electronic voting machines and that the time-code "12:00" will not stop blinking on and off.
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