Dick Morris is calling out the WaPo today over their headline:
Three Polls Show Obama Widening Lead Over Romney
The MSM is doing their best to show some Obama Lovin’ and put some momentum in his corner but the numbers cited by WaPo are ridiculous.
The real numbers, of likely voters are found in the Rasmussen Polls which had Romney ahead by three yesterday and four today. Gallup, which surveys registered voters (as opposed to likely voters) has the race tied at 46-46.
There are several factors which explain the difference:
1. Obama’s voters don’t want to come out and vote for him. They are only lukewarm and are not people who always vote. Cynical and apathetic, they do not begin to approximate the intensity of the Romney voters or even of the 2008 Obama backers.
2. Black turnout is traditionally 11% of the total vote. In 2008, rose to 14%, providing Obama with more than half of his margin of victory. Current polls suggest a reversion to the pre-2008 turnout level, but polling firms that do not measure voter intention can’t tell that and weight the black vote up to 12, 13, or even 14 percent, padding Obama’s vote artificially.
3. Likewise with Latino vote which was 7% of the vote and grew to 8.5% in 2008. Their votes this time show signs of returning to historic norms
4. Polls of registered voters tend to weight up the Democratic respondents, according their opinions more weight in the poll. That’s because their data usually shows fewer Democrats in their sample than in national registration figures. But, in weighting for party, they obscure the fact that a great many registered Democrats have left the Party, particularly in the past few years, a finding that is obliterated by the weighting.
Then we have RCP:
Today’s RCP average shows Obama with a 4.4 point lead nationally. The average is based on nine recently released polls. Five of these, four of which show outsized leads for Obama, have serious partisan skews favoring Democrats. The Pew “poll,” which shows Obama up 10, has a D+19 skew. FoxNews Poll is D+9, NBC is D+9 and CBS is D+7. The CNN poll, which I discussed today, seems to have a D+10 skew. None of these partisan breakdowns is an accurate prediction of what the electorate will look like in November, yet they do impact the current RCP Average.
The four polls with more reasonable assumptions of partisan breakdown show a much closer race. Still, only two of these poll “likely voters”–Rasmussen and Democracy Corps. Registered voter polls inherently give Democrats a 2-3 point edge in results. Factor all these variables in and the race is probably a wash, with the probability of a slight Romney edge.
And yet, most pundits and analysts are taking the current average and declaring that Obama is clearly in command of the race. That may in fact be the case, but when the average is impacted by a number of highly skewed polls, its not a conclusion on which I would wager a lot of money.
It humorous to watch these “analysts” declare Obama the leader…Rasmussen is pretty much the only reliable polling firm out there today since they use a sample population of “likely voters” instead of “adults” as well as the fact they don’t oversample democrats by 10 points. Meanwhile Obama’s approval rating is down to 43%, the Obama mystique has been utterly destroyed, and the economy is in shambles.
What media bias?
See author page