Once Again, the Skewed Polls are Telling Conflicting Stories
For the last month, we have been seeing polls that range anywhere from Obama up by eight, to him being within the margin of error. However, with the oversampling of Democrats being so prevalent, it is more likely that this race is tied, or even Romney is in the lead.
According to a new Washington Post survey, among likely voters, Obama is ahead of Romney in Ohio by 52 to 44 percent, and in Florida, the president is up 51 to 47 percent. However, this poll is using a model that resembles 2008, when there is little reason to believe that this will be the case. They have party ID with Democrats at 35%, Republicans at 26% and Independents at 35%, plus 3% saying they have no preference. More on this in a minute, let us just say the media is known to do this, even when conventional wisdom says it will not look like 2008, and will likely be more like 2004.
This Gravis Marketing/Capitol Correspondent Ohio 2012 Presidential survey of 594 likely voters was conducted September 21-22, 2012. It had a margin of error is +/- 4.3 percentage points. It used a party ID that looked like this: 41.4% Democrat; 31.1% Republican; 27.5% Independent/Other. Once again, this poll is over sampling Democrats, but the results are different.
Apparently, the results from the poll conducted September 7-8, 2012 are in curly brackets. Results from the poll conducted September 2, 2012 are in square brackets. Results from the poll conducted August 27, 2012 are in parentheses. Hey look, I did not construct this poll, so blame someone else.
Barack Obama-Joe Biden 45.2% {47.27%} [43.7%] (45.3%)
Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan 44.3% {43.19%} [46.8%] (44.4%)
Other/Unsure 10.4% {9.54%} [9.5%] (10.3%)
However, as one of my favorite bloggers Nice Deb points out in her post, the 2010 mid-terms Ohio exit poll showed Republican with a +1 party ID - Democrats 36% and Republicans with 37%. Additionally, Gallup is showing Party Id in Ohio this year to be Democrats with 42% and Republicans with 41%. That at most is showing a +1 for Dems.
Look at this site, it takes all the recent polling data, and shows what they would look like if they used polling data that is skewed towards the likely voter ID numbers. The average polling has Romney beating Obama by 7.8%. In this unskewed average, Romney has 51.8 and Obama has 44.0%. If this site were correct, Romney would win this by a landslide. However, it is likely closer to what Dick Morris said it was.
Continued on the next page
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