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Does a fat dog fart?
It’s all about voter turnout. Harder to poll.
All of the polling organizations mentioned are of the Ersatz variety, not real, phoney, something other than they seem. The news media employ polling organizations to manufacture news when actual newsworthy events are in short supply. These polling organizations provide that service and since their real clients are left wing advocates, they use various techniques to deliver the news that their client wants. Its all baloney until in the final days before the election when they must adjust their methodology to produce a credible result when compared with actual votes.
Real polling organizations sell their data to candidates, PACs, and people with skin in the game. Their data never appears in the media because it is too valuable. Even respected political pundits don’t routinely see their stuff, its too valuable to be put in hands of people not willing to pay top dollar for it. This is why candidates often act 180 degrees out from what the Real Clear Politics average is saying. They have the real data, and when its out of synch with what is out there for public consumption, they seems to be behaving irrationally.
Public polls will invariably skew left until the 2d week of October. On that you can depend.
...Are bears Catholic?...
You can get any poll to say what you want. If you’ll read the fine print, most of the polls favoring Obama are polled from “registered voters.” About 40% of them are not even going to vote. The polls that show Romney winning are polled from “likely voters.” Most of them will be at the polls on election day. Of course there are the polls that are heavily stacked with Democrats. The only poll that counts is the one on November 6th. What more can I say.
Polling is mostly left-wing oriented.
It will typically favor the Democrat in the early polls, hoping to demoralize the Republican electorate and encourage its favored Democrat base, and all the stuff that goes with that impression-building, like contributions from the moneyed groups who want to be with the winner, favorable punditry, etc.
The pollsters, even the left-wing ones, do know what’s going on with public sentiment, but they will keep that hidden lest it hurt their candidates.
However, these pollsters also want to preserve their credibility so they can be hired in future campaigns. So in the last two weeks of the campaign, they will start showing honest numbers hoping they will match well with the final election results.
You saw this in 1980, when the polls had Reagan and Carter in a dead heat, when anyone with a brain would see that Carter was toast. Then in the last two weeks, they claimed there was a great shift to Reagan. Really - did you know anyone who made their mind up in the last two weeks?
Likewise, they had Mondale in a dead heat, on his way to winning Minnesota (and only Minnesota, by a mere 10,000 votes). They had Dukakis up 17 points over Bush the Elder. The 1994 Congress? also a dead heat until the election came close.
So expect to see the polls have Obama, the Carter clone, running even or even slightly ahead of Romney up until Halloween. Then to preserve their credibility, the polls will show Romney slightly in the lead until election day. Thus after the election they can brag that they called the results, and claim that there was a huge shift in the independents and undecideds over to Romney.
Want a good indicator of this election? Do you know any people who voted for McCain who are now going to vote for Obama? Now, have you heard of any people who voted for Obama who are now sick of him and will not vote for him again? The traffic is all in one direction.
Unless he blows it by doing something dumb, like changing on illegal immigration because of RINO establishment pressure, the current polling means that Romney will win over 300 electoral votes.
Bookmark this so you can congratulate me on November 7th.
Incidentally, this puts these polls much more in line with the Rasmussen poll, which has consistently found a toss-up race. Right now, Rasmussen – a poll of likely voters – sees an R+1.4 advantage in party identification. That is entirely defensible, in my opinion, given the weakness in the economy.
A final point: Presidential job approval polls are usually reported among all adults, aged 18 or over. These tend to have an even larger skew toward the Democrats than registered voter polls. For instance, the CBS News / New York Times poll had a D+6 spread among registered voters, but a D+7 spread among all adults. This means that the job approval numbers are probably overstating Obama’s position by an even larger margin. So, the CBS News / New York Times poll had Obama’s net approval at -2, suggesting that among the electorate it’s perhaps around -6. I’d link this back to my consistent argument that presidents rarely win a share of the electorate larger than their job approval to justify my sustained bearishness on Obama’s reelection prospects. I suspect that the Rasmussen poll on job approval is closest to the electorate’s true feelings, and that regularly shows a net disapproval around -5 points, a very bad position for any incumbent.
This seems to be the meat of the article and it is fully in accord with the views expressed here on Free Republic with which FReepers have closely analyzed polls as they have come out. Our consensus has been that Rasmussen is the most accurate for the reasons expressed in this article.
I am optimistic in this election because I believe the momentum is on our side and expect that to gather force with time providing, of course, there is no major gaffe by Romney and no cleverly contrived October surprise by Obama. In the latter regard, I have one eye always focused on the Straits of Hormuz. But Obama could exploit Syria or contrive some sort of crisis with China to stimulate the patriotism reflex. I am also convinced that the economic news simply cannot get meaningfully better before the election and will probably become much worse.
I am concerned but not shaken by the stubbornness with which Obama retains his hold on those segments of the demographic which should be winnable for a Republican contender, especially single women. Romney has money with which to tell the story and he has a good story to tell. Obama has enough money to tell his lies but still he must construct a house of cards and when one strut in such an edifice gives way the whole implodes. We have enjoyed a taste of that in the reaction to Obama's gaffe in Roanoke in which he proclaimed that entrepreneurs did not build their own businesses. That gaffe approaches game breaker status because it crystallizes the subconscious understanding of much of the electorate about Obama's radicalism. These gaffes change elections when Joe sixpack reacts, "yes, that's the way he is." And Obama ceases to be the Messiah, or even cool, and becomes the author of our economic misery because of his radicalism. He loses his cool and becomes an enemy.
We have seen time and again in politics the phenomenon of politician being defined and electorate's mind is ever after closed. Thereafter, the electorate views the candidate through a different lens. Once the electorate sees Obama as a radical, they will understand that his goal has always been redistribution rather than recovery. The electorate will have an epiphany and see Obamacare as one more piece of the socialist puzzle. The indictment of Obama will ring true and his house of cards will implode. His likability quotient will plummet because he will be recognized as a very unlikable person, indeed the enemy of prosperity. He will get the blame he richly deserves for the failed recovery. Voters in the coal belt will understand why they are losing their jobs and see themselves as victims of Obama's radical ideology.
If Sarah Palin had been unleashed in 2008 to make the case then that Obama was a radical (if not a communist or socialist at least an Alinsky redistributionist radical) we would be well advanced in this process today. It is in this context that we can see the fatal damage John McCain did to his own campaign and to conservatism in general by telling the electorate that they had nothing to fear from Obama as President. Precisely the opposite was and is the case. He is a dangerous radical. When Obama indicts himself out of his own mouth as he did in Roanoke, the electorate begins to take the wrong end of the telescope out of its eye and accurately perceive Obama for what he is. Pity that the process is only gathering momentum a scant hundred days away from an election that could decide whether the Republic survives as a functioning representative democracy with portions of a free-market economy intact.
Whether they are or not, they are most definitely skewed towards Obama and Romney. We have had at least a dozen polling calls in the last few weeks, and never has any choice but those two pro-choice democrat socialists been offered. Not once.
What I’ve said for two months now: while this will be “close” in terms of popular vote, it will be pretty big electorally in dozens of “close” state votes. “Close Romney victories in OH, FL, WI, MI, VA, NV, IA,, NH, and maybe a couple of other 2008 Obama states will amount to a pretty significant electoral lead.
This information was very helpful LAST WEEK when it was put together by Jim Geraghty at National Review on line. This rip off without attribution is shameful.
I find it interesting that how terrible these state polls are does not get commented on more. One can understand the MSM not commenting, but even sites which are either neutral or leaning right don’t often do so.
E.g., the RCP state polls show the election basically where it was in 2008, except for Romney flipping NC and IN. This can’t possibly be right, just by looking at the job approval numbers. Obama is running behind Bush in 2004, and Bush only won by Ohio. The state polls should basically be showing Romney ahead in the states which Bush won, excepting possibly NV, CO and NM, which have trended Dem, as Romney is about where Bush was in 2004. But they seem to be skewed, on the average, by about 5 percent.
Interestingly, even the Rasmussen state polls are showing Obama doing better on a state by state basis than the national polls would show. Perhaps newer polls by Rasmussen will show something different.
Besides Rasmussen, the Battleground polls are good, and Mason-Dixon. Some of the others too, sometimes, depending on the internals. To have internals with 7% more Democrats is ridiculous.