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Juicing the Polls - No Surprise, No Worries.

by Conservativity Staff,
Originally Posted: 9/27/2012 11:20:49 PM

Juiced polls – they are the truly shocking unreported story of this election cycle. Polls that misrepresent the state of the presidential race by counting far more Democrats than Republicans, even past the numbers of 2008, which historians agree was an abnormally high year for Democrat voter turnout. Mike Flynn describes this anomaly in Breitbart.com as follows:

“The Dem vote in ’08 was the largest in decades. It came after fatigue of eight years of GOP control, two unpopular wars, a charming Democrat candidate who was the Chauncy Gardner of politics, a vessel who could hold everyone’s personal dreams and hopes for a politician. It was a perfect storm for Democrats.”

I could not say it better, nor could anyone else. 2008 represents a high water mark in left-wing voter turnout. Now, however, the Rasmussen monthly party identification tracking poll is not at D+8 but at R+4. Rasmussen is, however, being prudent and weighting his polls to an average of D+3, yielding a tie. If you apply the R+4 party identification to the polls, Romney leads by more than the margin of error, and is over the magical 50% that every candidate waits to see. Six days from the posting date of this article, the candidates debate for the first time. Mr. Romney is an outstanding debater; that trait helps to explain why the Romney campaign seems so sanguine about these juiced polls.

In fact, the campaign that is taking the desperate action is that of President Obama. They release attack ads that don’t pass the fact checkers’ laugh test. They are accused of intimidating Gallup, one of the honest pollsters, with a tweet by David Axelrod and the United States reviving an apparently frivolous “whistleblower” lawsuit filed against it by a disgruntled employee. These are not the actions of a campaign that is confidently strolling the path to victory.

Now, why would a campaign push for polls to say that their candidate has a big lead, especially as early voting commences? With a hat tip to Rush Limbaugh, the answer is as he stated it: The Obama campaign is trying to: (i) Suppress and deflate the enthusiasm of the Romney vote; (ii) Impede Romney fundraiser – when a candidate looks like a loser, the money dries up; and (iii) Silence the critics of the candidates’ policies.

These pollsters are ignoring the GOP landslide of 2010. They are ignoring Mr. Rasmussen’s party ID poll. They are sampling at rates that treat the “perfect storm” year of 2008 as a baseline from which Democrat support can only grow. And they are doing to try to tilt the pinball machine to Mr. Obama’s favor. They know that the election, in reality, goes poorly for the Democrats.

What effect will these juiced polls actually have? Well, some GOP stalwarts are panicking. These people are smarter than this; it boggles my mind as to why they are acting as if the sky is falling. Meanwhile the media has all but written Mr. Romney’s obituary. Those of us who have seen the media agitprop of the past, back before there was a World Wide Web to correct disinformation, will remember that similar efforts were made in 1980 and 1984, with the polls showing Ronald Reagan heading to a resounding and ignominious defeat. In the end, however, Mr. Reagan won landslides, the 1984 race coming within a hair of being a 50-state sweep.

However, compared to 1980 and 1984, we are seeing an all-out attack by the “Democrats with Bylines” group of Obamaphiles. It has never been this bad. Even the ultra-juiced exit polls from the 2004 election pale in comparison to the blatant poll-rigging going on in every poll sponsored by a news media outfit. The leftist pundits inveigle the public with such titles as The Poetic Justice of Romney’s Self-Immloation – Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine. Now, not only has Romney self-destructed, but the putative implosion is “poetic justice?” Those who claim to be journalists should actually act like them.

Now, what will happen? Those who would have voted for Mr. Romney will still vote for him. They may not vote early but the undecided voters in this election will not be the early voters; they will be the election day voters. The juiced polls may juice up a small extra turnout for Mr. Obama.

Nor will this effort affect Mr. Romney’s fundraising. Simply put, Mr. Romney’s donors are smarter than Mr. Obama’s donors. They are highly unlikely to fall for this nonsense. As for the polls, those pollsters who care about their reputation will begin to unwind their deceptive skullduggery, at least in part, as the election approaches. A pollster who predicts a ten point Obama win, only to see Mr. Romney win by five when it is all said and done, has squandered his reputation.

I feel that even the honest pollsters, namely Rasmussen and Gallup, have been oversampling Democrats. D+3 would be prudent before 2010; based on the way the public looks now, R+1 with more independents in the mix is an accurate mix. Moreover, those pollsters who think that the youth vote will come out for Mr. Obama more than in 2008 are delusional. Neither youth nor the African American community will turn out in as large numbers as in 2008; on the other hand, I expect much higher GOP turnout than in 2008, and perhaps even higher than 2010. R+5 on election day would be unsurprising.

Rush Limbaugh is leading the charge on the juiced polls, but by no means is he a lone voice in the wilderness. As people begin to review these poll numbers in detail, they will realize just how insane the internals have been. At that point, the polls will have no credibility, except for the one taken on November 6, 2012.

If you are shocked and disappointed at the media, given its long track record of doing exactly what it’s doing now, then you should resign yourself to shock and disappointment at the media, and a hearty dose of schadenfreude on Election Night.