WaPo Poll - Obama Losing Independents, Tied With Romney (Due to Skewed Sample)

Yesterday, a Washington Post/ABC Poll came out. The results were staggering, especially when one looks at the skew in the overall polling sample to favor Obama.

A few things to note: This is a poll of Registered Voters, not Likely Voters. By the polls own admission (page 7 of the poll breakdown) only 79% of the individuals polled are either certain to vote or will probably vote. So more than 20% of the people polled won't show up to vote.  Then there was the polling sample. The sample of personal identification with a party (note: not party registration) was: Democrat - 33%, Independent - 36% and Republican - 24%. So a 9% advantage of Democrats over Republicans.

Compare that to Rassmussen's recent survey asking people of their personal party identification (again, not registration) was Republican - 33%, Democrat - 31%, and Independent - 28%. So to do a direct comparison, the Washington Post oversampled Democrats by 2%, undersampled Republicans by 9% and oversampled Independents by 8%. Either way, it's a massive swing of 11% in the favor of Obama. So that would explain how Obama manages to remain tied with Romney given his massive loss with Independents, which we will now mention.

According to the Washington Post/ABC Poll, specifically with the sample of Independents polled only (so the sample skew doesn't matter...this particular published finding is a sample of 100% independents so it doesn't matter if Independents were oversampled in the overall poll): Romney is beating President Obama 43% to 37%.  To compare, in 2008, Obama won Independents 52% to 44% for John McCain (not sure who the other 4% voted for?).

Bottom line here is this: if Obama loses Independents, he loses the White House. It's just that simple. Without winning independents Obama does not have a prayer. Putting aside the underhanded oversampling of Democrats by the Washington Post and ABC (which this blogger has come to expect), we can look at the individual samples of party indentification and see that self-identified Independents are not planning to vote for President Obama.

So unless the Democrat Party somehow manages to cook the electorate (not so subtle voter-fraud reference) Obama's in trouble. Which is what I've been saying all along. Game on.