And That’s How They Balance The Budget, Too
Republicans really, really hate it that Mitt Romney is getting beaten like a snare drum in the polls. Hell, even Fox News says he’s going down.
Dean Chambers: Republican Slide Rule King
So, Republicans had to fix that. Enter Dean Chambers, a Republican pollster without arithmetic skills, which, of course, is not hard to find.
Chambers has a solution: change the partisan weighting of the polls. So, if you claim to be a Democrat and have always voted straight Democratic, in Chamber’s world you’re a Republican. He fixed that little pesky problem by making a D into an R and now Romney leads Obama by 7 points.
Guess who really, really love this new form of polling?
No, seriously, guess.
Okay, okay, don’t.
And the link leads to Chamber’s website. And who says that this crazy world is not a wondrous place when two great intellectual meet?
Thanks to Brian for the heads up.
Basic statistical design that measures attitudes are unlike those that measure stable indicators such as age & gender by the Census Bureau. Statistical polling of party identification and probable voting must be designed to measure variability over time; however, Frank Newport, PhD – Editor-in-Chief of Gallup’s ‘Polling Matters’ – had this to say about it:
“I’ve been analyzing election surveys at Gallup since the 1992 presidential election, and I don’t personally put a great deal of stock in survey-to-survey variations in party identification. All of our weighting focus is on the effort to bring more solid demographic variables into alignment with census figures — including in recent years cell phone and landline phone use. We don’t find that party identification is stable enough to be of much use when it comes to comparing sample-to-sample variations, or sample to exit poll differences.”
http://pollingmatters.gallup.com/
1fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver’s blog at the NYTimes seems to be pretty scientific and accurate.
2Y’all Chris CHRISTIE – enormous repub gov of NJ – says the polls are NOT skewed. Not Skewed. NOT. I don’t like him much, but he IS a lot smarter than Gov Goodhair, who still, IMO, needs to be killed, and, at the very least, voted out of Austin dammit.
3Keep in mind that Chambers, working out of his home, figured out a way to make some big money by beginning a blog on the Examiner – a national network that pays independent bloggers by traffic.
He’s using Scott Rasmussen’s partisan polls then hiking the results. Why? Because it will drive the GOP’s right wing traffic to his blog & make him some money to live on. And so it did…
Thanks to Perry, a link to his site was later posted on the Buzzfeed, Drudge Report, PJ Tatler… and counting!
Soooo predictable! Just follow the money down the rabbit hole if you want to figure out what is really going on.
4TPM’s PollTracker’s party identification from all polls
As of 9-16-2012: As of 11-1-2010:
22.1% Republican 30.1% Republican – 8.0%
33.3% Democrat 34.1% Democrat – 0.8%
34.3% Independent 28.0% Independent +6.3%
Rasmussen’s polls of partisan trends favors Republicans:
As of 8-31-2012: As of 11-1-2010:
37.6% Republican 36.0% Republican +1.6%
33.3% Democrat 34.7% Democrat – 1.4%
29.2% Independent 29.3% Independent +0.1%
http://polltracker.talkingpointsmemo.com/contests/us-party-identification
5Rrrrrrrrasmussen actually IS guilty of skew, through questionable methodology and weighting, to the point where I just add 5 blue points to his numbers anymore.
Real Clear Politics, which has gained an undeserved reputation for “fairness” by airing “both sides” in a deluge of false equivalence vomitus, provides an average of polls which has become a favorite barometer among the lazy media for describing an “unbiased” state of the race.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as the Rrrrrrasmussen numbers drag the RCP average back towards Romney, screwing and skewing THAT barometer already for both national and state races.
ALL THAT HAVING BEEN SAID: the state of the race via RCP averages shows a clear dominance by the President. And Rasmussen himself said you can’t use his weighting with other people’s methodology.
If there were a such thing as Math police, most everybody I know would be either on trial, in jail or on parole, but this guy would be on Death Row as a math murderer.
6I trust Intrade more than any polls. Right now it shows the smart money is 75 to 25 in favor of Obama. Intrade takes the politics out of it and makes it all about money. I would challenge all Republicans to put their money where their mouth is.
7Ralph ~ Do you know how well Intrade performed compared to polls? The Iowa Electronic Market (IEM) for political trading is open to traders worldwide with only $5 to $500 real money, and has a 74% predictive value. (http://tippie.uiowa.edu/iem/)
IEM Graph as of 9-5-12 shows Obama way ahead of Romney:
http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_Pres12_VS.cfm
Research Abstract:
8“Prediction markets” are designed specifically to forecast events such as elections. Though election prediction markets have been being conducted for almost twenty years, to date nearly all of the evidence on efficiency compares election eve forecasts with final pre-election polls and actual outcomes. Here, we present evidence that prediction markets outperform polls for longer horizons. We gather national polls for the 1988 through 2004 U.S. Presidential elections and ask whether either the poll or a contemporaneous Iowa Electronic Markets vote-share market prediction is closer to the eventual outcome for the two-major-party vote split. We compare market predictions to 964 polls over the five Presidential elections since 1988. The market is closer to the eventual outcome 74% of the time. Further, the market significantly outperforms the polls in every election when forecasting more than 100 days in advance.”
Btw… in the “winner-take-all” market, the spread is growing ever wider with Obama winning a landslide… http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_Pres12_WTA.cfm
Now Congressional seats are where the action is going to be in October… a real tight race in both houses for control. This is where the GOP leadership is putting all of its efforts & funding. Poor Mitt… wonder when he’ll figure out he is just another sacrificial lamb while Dems clean up their Bush mess.
9Never take anything for granted, not with the Koch brothers and Rove and their buddies lurking in the background.
10Let’s hope the Dems we elect will act like Dems and not wusses. I’m so tired of Dems going all limp in the critical area once they’re elected. Not to mention the blankety-blank ones that run as Dems and then switch after the election (as a well-known Williamson County DA did some years back…I SO don’t have any respect for Ken Anderson! Ran as a Dem, and two months later came out of the closet clothed in Elephant Gray.) (Which brings up another thought…is Elephant Gray really Confederate Gray since so many Elephants now are people who seem to want to regain antebellum privileges?)
11The old “bait & switch” turn around happened here in Georgia. Now if that had been a GOP turn-coat, he’d have worried about getting hung in the woods at night.
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