Geraghty quoting GOP pollster McLaughlin over at NRO:
…How campaigns try to sway polling results: “In a close race, the operatives are trying to manipulate the turnout through their paid and earned media. The earned media includes lobbying and trying to skew the public polls. Historically the most egregious case was the 2000 Gore campaign’s lobbying the networks’ exit pollsters for an early, and wrong, call in Florida. This suppressed the Florida Panhandle and Western state turnout.” (Polls close at different times in different parts of the state, because the state stretches into two time zones.) “In our post-election Florida poll, we found that thousands of Panhandle Floridians heard the call and although their polls were still open for an hour in a close national race decided not to vote. Panhandle voters went two-to-one for Bush. The CBS early wrong call nearly triggered a national crisis.”
On what a realistic partisan breakdown would look like: “The 2004 national exit polls showed an even partisan turnout and Bush won 51–48. Had it been the +4 Democratic edge of 2000, John Kerry would have been president. 2008 was a Democratic wave that gave them a +7 partisan advantage. 2010 was a Republican edge. There’s no wave right now. There are about a dozen swing states where in total millions of voters who voted in 2008 for Obama are gone or have not voted since. There are also hundreds of thousands of voters in each of several swing states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, and others who voted from rural, exurban or suburban areas in 2004 for Bush who did not vote in 2008, because they were not excited by McCain or thought he would lose. They are currently planning to vote mainly as a vote against President Obama.”
What Obama and his allies are doing now: “The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models…
Given that our venal MSM is entirely in the tank for Obama it wouldn’t take much lobbying or pressure to get an MSM poll – or a poll done independently for an MSM outfit – to skew their polling to advantage Obama. Good to remind everyone at this time that back before the primaries were even over I was saying that the polling will show Obama in good shape right through election day no matter who we nominated. First off this is because polling – for a variety of reasons – almost invariably over-states Democrat strength. Secondly because the MSM believes it is their moral duty to have our first African-American President re-elected. Their whole worldview is at stake here – if Obama loses, then they will feel it as a bitter, personal loss. They also must know, by now, that they are destroying their credibility with all non-liberal Americans and they clearly don’t care…saving Obama trumps all for 90% of the MSMers (which includes, by the way, a very large number – perhaps a majority – of those who work at Fox News; maybe not the on-camera talent, but the people who select and write the stories).
The good news for us is that GOPers and Independents are largely starting to tune out MSM coverage – the MSM is now, in a sense, lying in a void, with only dyed-in-the-wool liberals really paying attention to what they’re saying. We have, I think, reached a tipping point where those whom we need to vote are no longer susceptible to MSM narratives about how things are going.
Day by day I have only grown more certain of a Romney victory – it is still pretty early and a lot of things can happen, but absent a spectacular meltdown by Romney, I expect he’ll win on November 6th. The reason I’ve felt this way is because of objective facts: the economy is bad. Our global position is in collapse. Obama has proven himself to be both dishonest and incompetent. Nearly a million swing State voters switched their registration from Democrat to GOP or Independent over the past couple years. Far from being outspent 2-1 (as almost everyone expected a year ago) the GOP challenger looks to be able to match Obama dollar for dollar. Obama can’t generate the crowds he got in 2008. Republicans are not hyped up on something like “hopium” as the Democrats were in 2008, but are grimly determined to win – they have become “broken glass” supporters of Romney (meaning they will crawl on their knees across broken glass to get Obama out of the White House). The election results in 2010 indicated a massive rejection of Obama’s liberalism. The Democrats poured everything they had in to blue Wisconsin and came up losers. Election results are showing that pollster are not just under-stating GOP turnout but are missing a huge chunk of GOP voters, entirely (these are TEA Party people who have been brought in to politics only since 2009; what really brought this to light was the GOP primary results in Indiana – Lugar was supposed to lose by 3 and ended up losing by 21…pollsters don’t miss by that much unless there is a gigantic group of voters who either never voted before or only voted rarely in the past). All this and much more just shows me that Romney is the presumptive winner – that it is Obama who is in deep trouble and will have to fight and scratch and if he does win it will be only by the narrowest of margins (and if he does manage to win it may be with less than a majority of the popular vote). Of course Obama can win – he’s got a huge amount of power on his side and it may be enough to shove him through to victory…but, I doubt it.
