Ah, Those Polls...The New Campaign Tool

Usually, I limit the attention I pay to polls, because I realize that there's only one that counts, and it happens on Election Day.

But we're seeing a new development here, and it's insidious and worrisome.

Sometimes in past elections, you'd see an outlier poll or three that was obviously skewed. What new this year is that we are seeing an organized attempt to corroborate seriously cooked polls commissioned by the Obama Media with a serious media narrative by those same outlets that keeps working on drumming in the message that Mitt Romney is losing badly and that President Obama is inevitable.

The idea, of course is to dampen Republican voter enthusiasm, fundraising  and turnout.

Aside from oversampling Democrats, the Obama Media polls are getting the results they're getting from overestimating Democrat turnout.Let's examine how this works.

In 2008, the electorate that elected Barack Obama was 39% Democrat, 32% GOP and 29% Independent, a  D+7 electorate. And Barack  Obama defeated McCain by 7 points, the same margin.
In 2004, the electorate was 37% Democrat, 37% Republican, and 26% Independent.. President Bush beat John Kerry by 3 points nationally.

What alomost every Obama Media poll is doing is assuming to get their results is that the  Democrats equal or increase their share of the electorate over 2008, which was their largest in decades. That isn't going to hasppen.

2008 was a special year, with a seriously unpopular lame duck Republican in teh White House, with economic anxiety that was primarily created by the Democrat congress but was manipulated by their friends in the media to cast a taint on the GOP nominee that year, John McCain.

The Democrats had a young, charismatic Barack Obama selling hope n' change to camouflage his non-existent resume, someone who was a mirror for whatever people wanted to see in him.Since he had no real record, he was able to run on promises. And to add to the mix, John McCain was a flawed candidate disliked by much of his own party, ran one of the worst campaigns in living memory and,because McCain opted for public financing while Barack Obama famously broke his word on that subject and went private, McCain was outspent roughly ten to one.

None of these factors exist today. President Obama has a record he needs to run from, the financing is pretty much a level playing field this year, Barack Obama has a muchg tougher candidate to face  and Republican enthusiasm is a lot higher than it was in 2008, with higher percentages of Republicans and independents in the battle ground states and lower percentages of registered Democrats. Recent polls from AP, Politico and the daily tracking polls from Rasmussen and Gallup all figure in what will be a relatively lower turnout of Democrats in 2012 as compared to 2008, and they all  show the race essentially tied. Only those polls showing an electorate with Democrat affiliation equal or greater than 2008  show Obama with any sizable lead.

The proof on the ground  of this is that we're seeing President Obama speaking at smaller venues to smaller crowds than he did in 2008. If he was really pulling away, he be speaking tol arger crowds in bigger venues.

Another factor driving things is that the Obama Campaign spent a massive amount of money on ad buys right after their convention, while the Romney forces held off for the stretch. That may or may not have been a wise strategic decision, but we'll see.

My sense of this is that the country is divided right now, and that there's a great deal of flux in at least 10-15% of the electorate. In spite of the media's best efforts to keep it out of the news, a lot of Americans are waking up to the fact that the country is in dire economic straits and that things are getting worse, not better. And the economy is going to be the main issue of this election.

Mitt Romney has yet to sell  at least a part of the electorate that he is the man to lead us to an economic recovery, and the Obama Campaign's 'look a squirrel' strategy has done a decent job of distracting people from the president's own abysmal record, with the active participation of the ever helpful Obama Media.

However, in the debates, even though they are being hosted primarily by Obama partisans, Governor Romney  will have a chance to talk to the American people unfiltered and President Obama will likewise have to face up to his dismal performance.Americans are going to watch the debates and make up their minds.

One thing you can expect, of course, is that no matter how well Governor Romney actually does in the debates, the Obama media will call it for the president and release new polls showing the president 'won'. Expect skewed exit polls showing President Obama winning handily and early calls of states ala' Florida in 2000 to occur in a final effort to suppress GOP turnout.

Many of these people refer to themselves as journalists when  in fact,they're just campaign operatives.

Most of them have no idea how damaging this is.

Distrust of America's media is at an all time high, and what's even worse in many ways is the fact that a significant part of the media no longer evenmake an effort to hide thei rbias any more.

That's a very dangerous place for a free society to be in.