Let the Liberal Poll Cooking Begin!

It's election season, and the more trustworthy polling organizations are beginning to show a tough year for Democrats. So what is the official Drive-By Media response? Cooked polls!  Today we've found a fine example of this precise practice in the form of an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll that was published this past Friday. 

The outcome of this poll tries to say that President Obama has a fair lead over Mitt Romney if the election was held today, with Obama leading Governor Romney 49% to 43%.  This stands in stark contrast to the historically far more reliable Gallup tracking poll (that takes data daily and offers a 3 day rolling average) which shows Governor Romney leading the President 48% to 43%. 

So how in heaven's name does NBC come up with this data?  The devil is, as always, in the details. For starters, this poll's sample includes 9% more Democrats than Republicans (43% Democrat or Democrat leaning and 34% Republican or Republican leaning). Considering the question asked was not "what party if any are you registered with" but rather "which party do you most identify with" this is a clear skew that helps Obama look better. (It resulted in a +5% skew for Obama and a -6% skew against Romney...changing the predicted result.)

It is reasonable to assume that there are about the same number of Republican and Democrat leaning individuals in America as a base with maybe 10-15% true middle ground believers. Actually, as I've highlighted before, there are consistently more conservatives than moderates and consistently more moderates than liberals when it comes to a person's self-identity.

At the end of last year, 40% of Americans considered themselves conservative, 35% considered themselves moderate and 21% considered themselves liberal, according to last fall's Gallup Survey. Given a reasonable assumption that the vast majority of conservatives are Republicans and the vast majority of liberals are Democrats and splitting the moderates right down the middle, you get 48.5% Republican leaners, 38.5% Democrat leaners. So to take a poll that is 43% Democrat is highly dishonest.

There is, of course, corroborating evidence against this poll. For example, the poll asked about the preferred Congressional election outcome for each voter. The result was 46% preferring a Democrat Congress and 44% preferring a Republican Congress. This stands in stark contrast to Rasmussen's Generic Congressional Ballot poll which showed that 46% of likely voters prefer a generic Republican against 36% who preferred a generic Democrat. So this poll's skew resulted in a +12% net gain for the Democrats and a -2% net loss for the Republican. (Even in a cooked liberal poll, Republicans are close to beating Democrats!)

My friends, this is only the beginning. The Drive-By Media is not concerned with reporting the truth. They are concerned with skewing results to make Obama look better and to dishearted conservatives and Republicans so that we don't fight hard to defeat Democrats. We will not let them.

Fact is this election year is looking very bad for liberals and Democrats. Game on.