Purporting to respond to a full-page ad by MoveOn.org in the September 28 edition of The New York Times, Gallup Poll editor-in-chief Frank Newport dodged the ad's central charge that Gallup's polling methods favor Republicans. On the September 28 edition of CNN's Inside Politics, Newport referred to and purported to answer the following sentence from the ad: “Simply put, Gallup's methodology has predicted lately that Republican turnout on Election Day is likely to exceed Democrats' by six to eight percentage points.” In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, Gallup's polls do skew Republican by including more Republicans in their samples than statistics from the last two presidential elections show are representative of the electorate.

But rather than respond to the charge over Gallup's methodology, Newport focused instead on the ad's use of the word “predicted”:

Third is they state that Gallup somehow is predicting that there will be some percent of Republicans or Democrats or a result of the election on Election Day itself. Not so. We never predict. We say, “As of today, if the election were held today, these are the results that we would find.” We by no means are predicting. We all know, particularly with the debates ahead, that there can be significant change in everything between now and Election Day itself.

OK, we get it. Gallup isn't in the business of predicting. But, arguably, it might be in the business of producing polls designed to favor the Republican candidate for president.