Romney's Team Says Opinion Polls are Wrong

Opinion polls are all crap when one is losing. And besides, when they show Obama up by ten points one day and Romney with the same advantage the next, who can believe them? We pointed out this demographic inconsistency last spring and into the summer, criticizing the surveys. We advised readers to just ignore them at least until after the conventions were over, which they have been now for some three weeks.

A clear trend is emerging in current surveys: Obama leads in national polls, and in the all-important swing states, he is increasing his lead over Romney. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, he leads by about eight percent, while in Ohio, Nevada, Virginia and Iowa, his advantage is around four percent. Even in Florida, he has a three percent lead. All this is according to average poll numbers collected by RealClearPolitics. Nationally, Obama leads by four percent. His approval ratings have also remained constant at around 50 percent, and the rule of thumb is that the final vote count will be correspondingly similar.

So what do you do if you’re a survey analyst working for Mitt Romney? No, you don’t run out and start looking for another job. What you do is blame the polls. “I don’t think [the polls] reflect the composition of what 2012 is going to look like,” Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said, noting that predictions are based on the 2008 elections, when Democrats were highly motivated and went to the polls in high numbers. He maintains, not unreasonably, that 2012 will be different. However, Newhouse bases his assumption on Rasmussen polls that say that it will be a close race, with Romney slightly favored. He concludes, probably incorrectly, that the other polls don’t take varying scenarios into account as well.

The boys over at Unskewed Polls (which roughly translates as “Undistorted Surveys”) came up with even better numbers. If one puts their calculations up against the biased Democratic pollsters, Romney’s chances begin to look very good: On average, Romney leads Obama by some 7.8 percent and Obama’s approval ratings sink to 44 percent. There, you see? That’s more like it—it’s still anybody’s race. And even more importantly: Those numbers are reassuring to the big donors. After all, they don’t want to invest their money in a business about to go bankrupt. Now that’s a concept that Romney truly understands.