SALON

Wednesday, Oct 3, 2012 3:14 PM UTC

The GOP: Lovers of loopy poll conspiracies

A new poll reveals that seven in ten Republican voters believe that the numbers to date are skewed to favor Obama VIDEO

By

Topics: 2012 Elections, GOP, AlterNet, Republican Party, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Election Polls,

The GOP: Lovers of loopy poll conspiracies (Credit: AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

AlterNet There must be something liberating about being able to conjure up your own reality whenever the objective facts don’t suit you. But it’s not healthy for our democracy.

Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised by a poll released yesterday that finds more than 7 in 10 GOP voters believing that the polls are being intentionally “skewed” to favor Obama — after all, a third of conservative Republicans believe that the president’s a Muslim .

The Hill :

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.

But Republicans are particularly likely to believe that the polls are unfair, reporting by a 71-13 percent margin that polls are biased against their candidate. Members of the Tea Party suspect intentional skewing by a remarkable 84-5 percent margin.

This is all based on the rather odd notion that pollsters weight their samples for party identification, which is nonsense — with a few exceptions, like the GOP-friendly Rasmussen, they adjust only for demographics, and they do that according to the census.

As polling guru Nate Silver explains:

Pollsters, at least if they are  following the industry’s standard guidelines , do not choose how many Democrats, Republicans or independent voters to put into their samples — any more than they choose the number of voters for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney. Instead, this is determined by the responses of the voters that they reach after calling random numbers from telephone directories or registered voter lists…

Party identification is not a hard-and-fast demographic characteristic like race, age or gender. Instead, it can  change in reaction to news and political events  from the party conventions to the Sept. 11 attacks. Since changes in public opinion are precisely what polls are trying to measure, it would defeat the purpose of conducting a survey if pollsters insisted that they knew what it was ahead of time.

Here’s the deal: “independents” are the largest group of self-identified voters today. But there are very few genuine independents — most lean towards one major party or the other. So, voters’ partisan self-identification is a proxy for their enthusiasm — when a party has a strong candidate and a solid platform, the number of people who identify with that party rises, and when they have an awful candidate it falls. And here’s the reality of partisan ID today, courtesy of TPM:

 

Josh Marshall concludes, “the decisive move seems to be an exit from the GOP to the right,” but it could also be a result of voters fleeing the party’s extremism.

Whatever the case, this ridiculous polling narrative plays well with a party that sees itself as perennially victimized. In the real world, Nate Silver demonstrates that pollsters can be effectively “biased” against one party or another, but there’s no consistent pattern of bias in either party’s direction. It comes down to honest methodological errors, not any intent to shape an alternative reality. That, apparently, is the job of the right-wing media.

More Joshua Holland.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 29 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations