There’s that clichéd saying of “where’s there smoke, there’s fire.” Some in the media should have heeded that advice since a plurality of Americans sees a bias in the polling conducted between President Obama and Governor Romney. Oh, and, by the way, this information comes from a Daily Kos/SEIU poll, so it's hardly a right-wing source. Justin Sink of The Hill wrote today that:
some 42 percent of voters surveyed by Daily Kos and SEIU believe pollsters are manipulating their sample sizes to benefit the incumbent president, while 40 percent do not. An additional 18 percent said they were not sure. That's evidence that Republican claims that Democrats and minority voters are being oversampled in national polls could be resonating — and potentially undermining the momentum of the president's early lead.
Additionally, “independents are less likely to believe polls have been intentionally manipulated, with 45 percent of respondents saying they see deliberate tampering with the results. Four in 10 independents say they believe the polls are accurate.”
Unsurprisingly, “Democrats do not feel as passionately as their Republican counterparts about the validity of the polls.” The lack in faith in polling could be contributed to the overt skewing, which Mike Flynn and John Nolte at Beitbart have been exceptional at pointing out.
Flynn posted today that:
Yesterday's [Oct.1] 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:
Race is tight, but not in key states, poll shows
So, according to thePost'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.
Not only does this show that the average Joe Voter is engaged enough to see that the polls are egregiously biased towards Obama – but the deliberate inaccuracy of the methodology that is peddled by some in the media has made polling a facet of ornamentation rather than a serious gauge of the political landscape.
