Marist, the polling outfit that managed to find President Barack Obama with a mind-boggling 17-point lead in Virginia earlier this year, released its new Virginia poll on Wednesday. The poll found Mitt Romney closing the gap on President Barack Obama and only trailing Obama by two points, 48% to 46%. The poll was conducted before Romney thumped Obama in Wednesday night’s debate.
Marist says “little has changed” in the new poll but fails to mention what was perhaps the biggest difference from their last poll — its sample.
In September, the Marist poll had a D 5 sample and Obama led by five points.
In the October poll, the sample is D 3. Thirty-two percent of those surveyed were Democrats, 30% Republicans, and 37% independents. Among the independents, 13% leaned Democrat and 12 percent leaned Republican, giving Democrats a one-point advantage.
This leads one to ask whether Romney has closed the gap or if mainstream polling organizations like Marist, by oversampling Democrats, have purposely tried to give off the impression Obama was ahead in states like Virginia when the race has always been deadlocked.
For nearly a month, mainstream media organizations used Marist’s September poll to support their narrative that Obama was running away from Romney in Virginia and prematurely gave the state’s 13 key electoral votes to Obama.
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