“Something smells this morning. The MSM touting Romney in the lead, it smells like a desperate attempt to get out the Obama vote by scaring them. And perhaps plant some complacency in the Romney voters that if they don’t vote, no big deal.”
People here can’t have it both ways, though.
When O was “ahead”, people were complaining that they were cooking the polls to possibly depress GOP turnout and encourage the Dems to vote. Now that the polls show Mitt ahead, some people are saying its another scheme to influence turnout in the same way. They can’t both be true.
With this type of attitude, no matter what the polls show, someone can always say the results are some type of manipulative scheme. It’s a non-falsifiable attitude.
My own view is that the earlier polls with big leads for O had bad internals and oversampled Dems. But there’s no real reason for the MSM to manufacture a Romney surge at this point. This kind of thing doesn’t benefit Obama at all, so there’s no reason for them to falsely claim it unless the numbers were much closer to legit.
I agree; based on my experiences with other types of scientists, I don’t think many pollsters are intentionally tipping the scales. It is well known that the entire population of people who will answer a pollster’s phone call is NOT the same as the entire population of people who will vote on Election Day. So, they have to model things to correct for that. Nobody is going to use a model unless it makes sense to them. This is where bias can come in.
Now, hopefully they are also heavily relying on data. That data is flawed for the same reasons the raw data they are collecting now is flawed, which leads to some complicated situations.
It doesn’t make sense at this point to rig the polls to make Romney look stronger than he really is in order to depress turnout. For one, there is no evidence that it will do that — a significant number of voters have sheep-like tendencies and will support the eventual winner. You can see this in polls taken shortly after an election asking for whom they voted. The actual winner nearly always polls much higher than he actually performed on election day.
Plus, it is bad business for a pollster to start intentionally producing fake numbers close to the election if they ever want to get business next election.
Finally, you get Suffolk University polling pulling out of Florida, NC and VA claiming they are seeing the same thing. Along the same lines, most of the reporting I’m seeing is focusing on Ohio and the smaller swing states. From my perspective, it sure looks like everyone with private information thinks Romney is going to win Florida and North Carolina — the campaigns are still going strong because they are such big prizes neither can afford the risk of coasting — Romney is going to win Virginia, at least if he’s doing well enough to have a shot at winning the whole thing and the same for Colorado, making Ohio the key state that will probably decide the election.
Agreed. The debates sealed the deal with many people, they just wanted to be sure Romney could do the job.