A Pair Rasumssen Polls in IA, WI

These aren't all the polls. These are the good polls.

I don't feel completely hackish spotlighting them because I think that pollsters are calling anyone with a pulse a "likely voter," skewing results towards the Democrats. So I think results which show Romney tied or ahead are closer to predictive.

Rasmussen's apparently got a strong likely voter screen, as Bob Krumm wrote (linked in an earlier post).

Wisconsin: 49-49.

Iowa: 49-48, edge Romney.

Baseball Crank offers some more poll analysis at RedState.

My thesis, and that of a good many conservative skeptics of the 538 model, is that these internals are telling an entirely different story than some of the toplines: that Obama is getting clobbered with independent voters, traditionally the largest variable in any election and especially in a presidential election, where both sides will usually have sophisticated, well-funded turnout operations in the field. He’s on track to lose independents by double digits nationally, and the last three candidates to do that were Dukakis, Mondale and Carter in 1980. And he’s not balancing that with any particular crossover advantage (i.e., drawing more crossover Republican voters than Romney is drawing crossover Democratic voters). Similar trends are apparent throughout the state-by-state polls, not in every single poll but in enough of them to show a clear trend all over the battleground states.

If you averaged Obama’s standing in all the internals, you’d capture a profile of a candidate that looks an awful lot like a whole lot of people who have gone down to defeat in the past, and nearly nobody who has won. Under such circumstances, Obama can only win if the electorate features a historically decisive turnout advantage for Democrats – an advantage that none of the historically predictive turnout metrics are seeing, with the sole exception of the poll samples used by some (but not all) pollsters. Thus, Obama’s position in the toplines depends entirely on whether those pollsters are correctly sampling the partisan turnout.

Which they're not.

posted by Ace at 02:35 PM

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