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Given the margins that Obama is running over Romney...Obama is leading to the point that he will almost certainly win, but not so much that Conservatives have given up all hope and focused on Senate/House races. Its also not so "in the bag" for Obama that his campaign has changed their view from cautiously optimistic. Things could change, who can deny that? Will they...probably not...but they could.
Now, assuming this nonsense about skewing polls is valid.....how would that be of any incentive to the Obama campaign? If polls show him up by 6-8 points, you don't think that may cause some complacency amongst voters who would otherwise vote if the difference was within a point or two? There are people who vote only when they feel its 'important', and this happens on both sides of the aisle.
If they're fudging it for their advantage, if anything it would probably encourage more action from right leaning voters.
Here's an interesting take--Ron Reagan thinks that the FOX crowd is setting the stage to call Romney's loss the result of voter suppression--that the polling agencies are all in a vast left wing conspiracy to reduce the enthusiasm of conservative voters so they'll stay home. When Obama wins, they can then claim that it was an illegitimate win, and that he really shouldn't be president. The birth certificate argument blew up in their faces, so I guess this is round 2.
I agree that the polls motivate me that much more to make sure that "come hell or high water" that I cast my vote for Romney. However, I think in this case most people know that Obama is a failure and they are skewing the polls so that the people who know this and voted for him in 2008 will start to question their own good judgment and stay loyal to the party.
Given the margins that Obama is running over Romney...Obama is leading to the point that he will almost certainly win, but not so much that Conservatives have given up all hope and focused on Senate/House races. Its also not so "in the bag" for Obama that his campaign has changed their view from cautiously optimistic. Things could change, who can deny that? Will they...probably not...but they could.
Now, assuming this nonsense about skewing polls is valid.....how would that be of any incentive to the Obama campaign? If polls show him up by 6-8 points, you don't think that may cause some complacency amongst voters who would otherwise vote if the difference was within a point or two? There are people who vote only when they feel its 'important', and this happens on both sides of the aisle.
If they're fudging it for their advantage, if anything it would probably encourage more action from right leaning voters.
This is very easy to explain.
1) While the administration is not necessarily colluding with the media, the media is indeed making its contribution towards BO's re-election through biased reporting.
2) Most polls are commissioned by the media in some fashion. Very rarely do you see a poll that doesn't have a media institution affiliated with the poll itself. Conventional wisdom holds that a poll commissioned by a media outlet ("the customer") will in fact receive a product that fits the "customer's" expectation. I liken it to the scientist hired by the defense attorney. How many scientists have you ever witnessed that were paid by the defense actually come forth with evidence that didn't support the defendent? NONE. It's all about the "customer."
3) What you're not hearing is the "internal polling" results. All you hear about are public polling results, but you never hear about the results of polls conducted internally by/for the campaigns themselves. These polls are similar to "opposition research" in which the candidate has a better idea of the public sentiment based on their own research. When you hear Obama or Romney declare that they are "optimistic" about the status of the campaign, it's generally because they are armed with their own data, and not that of the NBC/CBS/WSJ/FOX polling data.
4) What does this mean? It means that you should ignore public polling. There's nothing objective about it, and the campaigns themselves aren't relying on it either.
How does 'skewing the polls' even give an advantage or make any sense?
The simple fact is that it makes no sense at all.
But we're dealing with rabid Obama-haters and sense isn't a commodity they deal in. They're so convinced that the lies they've invested in (bitherism, sharia law, secret muslim, etc) are true that they've further convinced themselves that the vast majority of Americans must believe it, too. It's just got to be true! They heard it from (choose one and/or all of the following) Fox News, Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Michael Weiner-Savage, Ted Nugent, Westboro Baptists, and/or Pat Robertson.
So, you see, all of those poll numbers are a vast conspiracy by liberal left-wing media to try to make their messiah (the POTUS) a two-termer because they want to ruin the USA just like the Democrats do. All "true" Americans hate Obama in RWNJ-land. Surely the left-wing pollsters aren't taking that into account.
Despite massive scientific evidence to the contrary, many people believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, that people lived among dinosaurs, that global warming is a hoax, etc. They rationalize their beliefs in many ways.
It's not a stretch for them to rationalize the results of poll after poll by saying liberals and the media are skewing them. Don't try to make sense of it, because it doesn't make sense. They want it to be true, so to them, it is true.
It's possible that Romney will win this election, because lots can happen before November 6. But that is not reflected in the current polls, no matter how much his supporters want it to be.
We shall see. I think people are going to be shocked by the actual outcome.
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How does 'skewing the polls' even give an advantage or make any sense?
