GOP Blame the Pollsters for Mitt's Fall

     Romney thinks his campaign is going fine. So here's another thing he's claiming that simply defies reality. But he's not trailing in the polls. Turns out polls are part of the liberal conspiracy:

     "Confronted with polling from New York City showing parents standing with teachers unions at an NBC News education forum Tuesday, Mitt Romney took a swipe at poll results in general. During a question and answer session at the NBC event, a New York public schools parent told Romney that polling showed parents "support the union to protect our kids three to one over the mayor and the chancellor."

      "Romney, who spent much of the session condemning teachers' unions, said the results were meaningless."

       "I don't believe it for a minute," Romney said. "I know something about polls, and you can ask questions and get any answer you want."

        "Current polling from the presidential race generally shows Romney running behind President Obama."

      http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/romney-on-polls-you-can-ask-questions-get

      The question was specifically about teacher's unions-for the record, I also support them. However, Romney is clearly pretty sensitive over polling in general right now as he trails in so many of them. So his answer is: polls can be made to say anything.

       No they can't. The one thing the polls have never said no matter how many questions they ask,, is that people like Romney and want him to be their President.

       The latest polls show him trailing by 8 points in Ohio and 4 in Florida. No GOP candidate has ever won the Presidency without winning Ohio.

       For a handle on how bad things are for Mitt in the polls see these links:

       http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/25/2012-polls-barack-obama-lead_n_1912113.html

       http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romney-is-now-a-long-shot/2012/09/25/54a48d04-0726-11e2-9eea-333857f6a7bd_blog.html

       So conservatives think the way to correct this is not for Romney to run a better campaign but to make the polls the issue: that is, shoot the messenger. Just last week,. of course, the GOPers were quoting the Gallup and Rasmussen polls which showed Romney roughly tied nationally-in contradiction to most other national polls, including other tracking polls like Retuers/IPSOS.

      Now, however, this strategy is taken away as Romney is now trailing even in these two polls. Indeed, Obama now has an approval-disapproval rating of 50-43. Today, Romney lost another point head to head, so the President now has a 48-45 lead. However, most other polls show his lead as being somewhat greater-Nate Silver now estimates it at about 5 points.

      In addition, the approval poll is on a 3 day rolling average while the head to head poll is on a 5 day moving average, so this gives a hint that maybe Obama's lead will increase on Gallup in the next few days.

      http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/sept-24-deep-red-polling-mystery/

      http://www.gallup.com/home.aspx

      As Greg Sargent observes:

       "It’s depressingly predictable: Every time a poll comes out showing Mitt Romney trailing nationally or in key states, Romney supporters scream or tweet: “Oversample Ds!” They claim that the pools of respondents — either accidentally or even deliberately — contain too many Democrats, meaning they don’t resemble the electorate that will turn out on Election Day, skewing the results against Romney."

       "But Steven Shepard calls up the pollsters themselves and gets them to explain what’s really going on here. Most pollsters don’t weight for party ID, for good reasons:

Pollsters counter that the results they are finding reflect slight changes in public sentiment — and, moreover, adjusting their polls to match arbitrary party-identification targets would be unscientific.

Unlike race, gender or age, all demographic traits for which pollsters weight their samples, party identification is considered an attitude that pollsters say they should be measuring. When party identification numbers change, it’s an indication of deeper political change that a poll can spot.

“If a pollster weights by party ID, they are substituting their own judgment as to what the electorate is going to look like. It’s not scientific,” said Doug Schwartz, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which doesn’t weight its surveys by party identification.

     "This isn’t to say that a poll can’t be inaccurate or fail to perfectly represent what the electorate will, in fact, look like. Rather, the point these pollsters make is that not weighting for party I.D. is a better course of action than weighting for it. If a sample shows more Dems than seems likely, then that could mean that “there are more people who want to identify with the Democratic Party right now than the Republican Party,” as Schwartz puts it. If you try to wipe out that finding by reweighting the sample, you risk losing sight of what may be an actual shift in the electorate. What’s more, weighting for party I.D. would require pollsters to predict themselves what the electorate will look like, which only risks introducing more error."

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-no-pollsters-are-not-conspiring-to-destroy-romney/2012/09/25/cf6c2af4-06fb-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_blog.html

      As Sargent mentions, part of the trouble is that conservatives all stay in their little GOP pod-Fox, Rush, Breitbart, etc.

      "Part of this is probably attributable to what Jonathan Bernstein has called the “conservative closed information feedback loop,” in which those who get their information mainly from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh have come to believe that anything that contradicts that info simply reflects the corrupt mainstream media’s efforts to keep Americans in a state of mass liberal ignorance, by shielding them from conservative truths. And so it’s not uncommon to hear that the only polls that “really count” or are “really telling the truth” are Gallup and Rasmussen, as if all other polls done by major news organizations are mere tools of that conspiracy. But in the real world, dismissing all the polls that don’t tell you what you want to hear as flawed or corrupt is hardly the way to win elections.

      Again, though, as we saw above, Gallup is starting to tell a different story now-and they were actually the first ones to notice the DNC convention bounce. It's interesting that Sargent mentions Limbaugh. He's the one who's been claiming for years that the proof that the media is all liberals is that most journalists are Democrats-as if that's really the best way to ascertain what a "lberal bias" would really amount to. In truth, of course, this whole idea is drawn way too crudely and broadly to mean much of anything, just a convenient cruch for the GOP.

      For us on the other hand-I speak to my fellow lib Dems here, though anyone is welcome to read us, assuming they can take it!-it seems the only threat we have is complacency. Just like in football, we're like up by 21 points after a close first half as we start the 4th quarter. We have to finish! That means the President needs us to keep doing what we do and of course vote early and often.