DICK MORRIS VIDEO: Actually, It’s Romney Who’s Gaining

“Evidence of a strong trend for Romney going on out there.”

Which is a counter to the legacy media narrative that Obama is running away with the race. And Morris also tackles this UnskewedPolls.com business, which is a great site pointing out that if you recalibrate the electorate to the actual party ID of the voters Romney is winning in all the polls the media says he’s losing in. Because there simply is no way the 2012 electorate will look like the 2008 electorate did – much less the even more Democrat-skewed profile the multiple polls out there show.

The pollsters are beginning to notice the complaints Morris gives voice to. And naturally they’re not taking it lying down.

Unlike race, gender or age, all demographic traits for which pollsters weight their samples, party identification is considered an attitude that pollsters say they should be measuring. When party identification numbers change, it’s an indication of deeper political change that a poll can spot.

“If a pollster weights by party ID, they are substituting their own judgment as to what the electorate is going to look like. It’s not scientific,” said Doug Schwartz, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which doesn’t weight its surveys by party identification.

The debate has been amplified as the pace of public polling has accelerated after party conventions. Pollsters are finding diverging results, with consumers of political media left to decide which surveys better reflect the reality on the ground — or to accept the polls most favorable to their partisan leanings. New, less expensive methods for taking polls have led to a proliferation of surveys with varying results, so both sides have ample data to fit their desired narrative.

Gripes about the party-ID composition of poll samples are certainly not new: Eight years ago, Democrats were claiming polls showing a surge in Republican identification did not accurately reflect the makeup of the electorate.

Now, it’s Republicans making the case their voters are undersampled.

Schwartz, whose institute conducts polls in battleground states for CBS News and The New York Times, asserts that pollsters who weight according to party identification could miss the sorts of important shifts in the electorate that could be determinative.

“A good example for why pollsters shouldn’t weight by party ID is if you look at the 2008 presidential election and compared it to the 2004 presidential election, there was a 7-point change in the party ID gap,” Schwartz said. Democrats and Republicans represented equal portions of the 2004 electorate, according to exit polls. But, in 2008, the percentage of the electorate identifying as Democrats increased by 2 percentage points, to 39 percent, while Republicans dropped 5 points, to 32 percent.

Asked specifically about GOP complaints regarding the party-ID composition of public surveys, Schwartz said: “They’re the ones trailing in our swing-state polls.”

“There are more people who want to identify with the Democratic Party right now than the Republican Party,” he added.

This is bullshit, of course, because between 2008 and now we had 2012, in which the party ID of the electorate swung back to the R side. And the pollsters refuse to even acknowledge that 2010 even happened, despite the fact that national conditions now look a lot more like 2010 than 2008.

We’ll find out on Election Day, of course. But Morris’ complaints about the horrific polling aren’t unique. This has been going on for weeks.

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