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Breaking from two decades of tradition, this year’s election exit poll is set to include surveys of voters in 31 states, not all 50 as it has for the past five presidential elections, according to multiple people involved in the planning.

.... I am a proponent of carbon taxes. One criticism of this policy that you hear, for instance here from Noah Smith, is that they are pointless because you need international cooperation to make a real dent. But among non-tradeable goods this is not really the case. We don’t have to worry about transportation shifting abroad, since you can’t really outsource driving your car or shipping a package. And this matters, as transportation accounts for 70% of U.S. fuel consumption, and 30% of U.S. greenhouse gases. But even if carbon taxes are problematic, surely higher gas taxes are a good...

The Romney campaign and other Republicans say polls showing President Obama with a significant lead over their candidate are inaccurate. They argue many mainstream polls skew in Obama’s favor because of sample sizes that base 2012 turnout projections on 2008, when Democrats — and Hispanics, blacks and young voters in particular — turned out in record numbers. “I don’t think [the polls] reflect the composition of what 2012 is going to look like,” Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said in an interview. Frustration that polls are skewed in favor of Obama has escalated among some on the right in recent weeks....

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Obama campaign said Tuesday that they care about the truth of their attacks. "We work very hard to get it right. We look at the facts. We vet what we say," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an ABC/Yahoo News panel.

It’s enough to make even the most ardent Obama cynic scratch his head in confusion. Amidst all the cries of Barack Obama being the most prolific big government spender the nation has ever suffered, Marketwatch is reporting that our president has actually been tighter with a buck than any United States president since Dwight D. Eisenhower...

- National RV (AP/GFK) Obama 47% Romney 46%. Poll sample D+8. June Obama 47% Romney 44%. Poll sample back then D+7 - National RV (Gallup) Romney 47% Obama 45% - National LV (Rassmusan) Romney 46% Obama 44% - Nevada LV (LVRJ/Survay USA) Obama 47% Romney 45%. Independents Romney 44% Obama 39%. Ryan’s budget play among Independents 49% approve 44% disapprove. Among Hispanics Obama 48% Romney 47%. It doesn’t really make sense but ok. The Poll is a sample D+3. - Wisconsin (Marquette university) among LV Obama 49% Romney 46%. among RV Obama 50 Romney 44%. Two weeks ago among LV...

President Barack Obama has one of the biggest leads we've seen for him in quite a long time in a new Pew Research Poll: He's up 10 points over Mitt Romney. Don't take much from it, though. Pew's sample of registered voters is highly skewed, oversampling Democrats by almost 20 points. Pew surveyed 1,956 registered voters. Of those, 42 percent were Democrats and just 23 percent were Republicans. We can't remember a poll being that imbalanced. Pew's poll in June also slightly oversampled Democrats and gave Obama a 7-point lead. So what we can take from this is that Independents...

New polling data out from Pew Research Center finds President Obama with a double-digit lead over Mitt Romney nationally: Currently, 51% say they support Obama or lean toward him, while 41% support or lean toward Romney. This is largely unchanged from earlier in July and consistent with polling over the course of this year. Across eight Pew Research Center surveys since January, Obama has led Romney by between four and 12 percentage points. Obama holds only a four-point edge (48% to 44%) across 12 of this year’s key battleground states. While the data does not allow a state-by-state analysis, the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: There's a new poll out. CBS/New York Times. Quinnipiac University. CBS and the New York Times are using a new pollster. And, folks, they are having an orgasm over this poll out there today. It's a poll of battleground states, and of course the end result shows Obama way up in all these battleground states. It's exciting. They can't wait to tell everybody about it. Except there's a problem. They do not break down the sample in the story. Neither the New York Times nor CBS let the reader know the partisan identification of the participants in...

Last night, I noted how NBC News was swimming against historical trends in pushing a poll with a deeply partisan skew in its sample. The poll, produced in conjunction with The Wall Street Journal, had a D+11 sample, i.e. 46% of the sample identified as Democrat, 35% identified as Republican. In 2008, a very big year for Democrats, the electorate was D+7, 39% Democrat, 32% Republican. In fact, you have to go back nearly thirty years to find an election with such a partisan skew. This morning, on MSNBC's Morning Joe, NBC political director Chuck Todd admitted their poll had...

A topic that inevitably receives a lot of focus during election season is the partisan spread of the major media polls. Conservatives regularly complain that the polls are tilted against their side, and thus favor the Democrats. They have a point. To be sure, we can conclude that without accusing any pollster of malfeasance. In this essay, Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Post correctly notes that the problem gets down to using registered voter polls. These tend to oversample Democrats. The argument in support of them is that, while a likely voter screen would draw a larger Republican sample, it...

Joining the ranks of drug pushers are what I would call polling-place pushers. These are people who run get-out-the-vote drives or at least agitate in that regard, and they are more to be feared than any corner dope peddler. As an example, pollster John Zogby recently lamented how the young people who catapulted Barack Obama to the presidency are now losing interest in voting. He said to the League of Women Voters (LWV), “I truly am worried about today’s twenty-somethings.” I have seen them move from hope and grand expectations for themselves and their world to anxiety and disillusionment.” That’s...

Nearly four years after enthusiastic younger voters poured into polling booths to help push Barack Obama over the finish line and into the Oval Office, their hope has turned to fear and pollster John Zogby says that they are ready to give up on politics. “I truly am worried about today's twenty-somethings,” he frets. “They are our global generation and I have seen them move from hope and grand expectations for themselves and their world to anxiety and disillusionment. We can't afford to lose them,” he adds.

Kermit the Frog established his legacy convincing millions of impressionable youth that "it's not easy being green." Unfortunately for the once famous frog, the Obama Administration has made poor Kermit look like a liar and burst the generational myth – apparently, it is a whole lot easier to be green than Kermit would have had us all believe. In a June 6 hearing to delve into exactly how the Administration comes up with all those green jobs they claim to have saved-or-created, Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee probed the essential question, "Just what...

Many of us oldsters remember the Bradley Effect. Back in ye olde 1982, Tom Bradley, the longtime popular mayor of Los Angeles, a nice affable fellow in my recollection, ran for California governor against a fairly faceless guy named George Deukmejian. Most of the polls — including exit polls — showed Bradley with a significant lead. But Deukmejian won, narrowly. This was all put down to a form of covert racism. People didn’t want to admit they wouldn’t vote for a black man. As an ex-civil rights worker, I remember being hugely depressed by Bradley’s defeat. Times have changed. These...

Obama Voters Losing Jobless Benefits Due to the Manipulation of Workforce Numbers May 11, 2012 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Michael in Momence, Illinois. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER: Thanks a lot, Rush, first-time caller. I'm calling because I was at the unemployment office just yesterday, and they have tables there where people fill out the paperwork that they have -- RUSH: Wait, wait, wait whoa, whoa, whoa, just a second. I need you to go slow here. CALLER: Okay. RUSH: Why were you at the unemployment office? It may seem like an obvious question, but...

Obama tells young reporters: Climate change a top challenge for young people By Andrew Restuccia - 08/30/11 01:21 PM ET Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing young people, President Obama said in a recent interview with young reporters from Scholastic News. “Another big challenge that your generation is going to face is the environmental challenge,” Obama said in an interview with Scholastic News Press Corp. that was conducted in July but posted online this month. “Although we’ve made big improvements over the last 20 or 30 years in making our air clean and our water clean, there...

Zogby Interactive: Obama Falls to 39%, As Support from Democrats Continues to Slide; He Trails Romney, J. Bush & Gingrich in '12 Those Saying U.S. on Wrong Track Hits High Under Obama of 69% UTICA, New York - President Barack Obama's job approval rating has dropped to the lowest point of his Presidency at 39%, and in potential match-ups with Republicans in 2012, he trails Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich and is just one point ahead of Sarah Palin. The percentage of likely voters saying the U.S. is on the wrong track is now the highest since Obama...

Americans aren't crazy about the new airport pat-downs. But according to a new poll, nearly half still back them, with even more supporting full body scanning. Forty-eight percent of Americans said the pat-downs are justified, while 50% said they are against the new measures, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll revealed. Meanwhile, the majority – 64% – said they supported the use of full-body scanners while 32% said they were against it. The 385 full-body scanners being used at 68 airports across the country have sparked an outcry from flyers, who argue they're virtual strip searches because they produce invasive,...