My colleague, John Nolte, has already covered how absurd the Washington Post poll of voters in “swing states” was. For the last few months, I have become convinced that the media is actively trying to use their polls to impact the Presidential election. Not the pollsters per se, but the media sponsors who pay their tab. They are active participants in the campaign. The Washington Post confirmed that my suspicions were correct. They are totally an in-kind contributor to the Obama campaign.
Yesterday’s Washington Post poll showed the race essentially tied, with Obama edging Romney by 2 points, 49-47. This goes against the entire media spin about the race, where Obama is supposedly clearly building up a big lead. So, the Washington Post creates a headline:
So, according to the Post‘s front-page, above-the-fold headline, the Presidential race may be tightening nationally, but Obama has a clear lead in the battleground states. It is what they tell themselves. What they don’t tell the reader, however, is that their poll of the “key states” is built on a sub-sample of 169 people–across all the battleground states. For those keeping score at home, that’s a margin of error of 8 points.
They show Obama with a…oh, the hell with it. This is total trash. Such a small sub-sample would barely be noteworthy in an internal polling memo. Yet, the Washington Post chooses to use this to frame a front-page, above-the-fold story. The only reason to do that is a deliberate decision to highlight anything positive for Obama.
Yesterday, a slew of polls came in showing a 2-4 point race. All of them had overly ambitious turnout models for Democrats and all of them had Romney winning Independents. Compared to polling over the last two weeks, an objective headline would have noted Romney gaining ground in the race. But, the media will not have that.
In recent weeks, the media have reported on the “debate” about skewed polling. But, there really is no debate. They are, in fact, inflating likely Democrat turnout. And when that isn’t enough to support Obama, they reach down for meaningless statistics within their poll to boost him. This is fraud.
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