“Personally, I think that Ras was looking over his shoulder and saw that his numbers would be big outliers compared to the other polls if he went GOP +2... and got scared and went with Dem +3.”
You may be right there, Arthurio. It has to be unnerving to try to conduct honest polling and see your results so far off from everyone else. Even if you know you are reporting accurate numbers, at some point you would wonder if maybe the pack is right and you might be doing something wrong.