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Rush Limbaugh, September 26, 2012
RUSH: Folks, there are a couple of polls out there today that are just outrageous. One is the CBS/New York Times poll. The other is the Washington Post poll. I'm telling you: They are irresponsible. They are designed to do exactly what I have warned you to be vigilant about, and that is to depress you and suppress your vote. These two polls today are designed to convince everybody this election is over.
. . . there could be a lot of reasons for this. Voter suppression, voter depression, set up the possibility of allegations of voter fraud.
They have all these polls with Obama running away with this, and then say Romney wins. Guess what happens? People blow a gasket on the left. There's also early voting going on, and they know this stuff is not reported to reflect opinion. They're trying to shape opinion with these polls.
Dick Morris on Sean Hannity, Fox News
Dick Morris: [Romney] at the moment is in a very strong position. I believe if the election were held today, Romney would win with four or five points. I believe he would carry Florida, Ohio, Virginia. I believe he would carry Nevada. I believe he would carry Pennsylvania.
Sean Hannity: Aw, come on!
Dick Morris: And I believe he would be competitive in Michigan. I just saw a poll in Pennsylvania by a group that I've hired in the past and I trust their polling. Two points behind. And Rasmussen has it five points behind.
People need to understand that the polling this year is the worst it's ever been.
Because this is the first election where if I tell you who is going to vote, I can tell you how they're going to vote. You tell me that you're black or Latino or a college kid or a single mother, I'll tell you how you're going to vote.
And if you tell me you're over 65, you're a man or a married white woman, I'll tell you how you're going to vote. And I'll be right 2 out of 3 times.
Therefore the issue is who's going to vote. Polling is very good at saying how you're gonna vote, it's very bad at saying who is going to vote. And the models these folks are using are crazy. They assume a Democratic edge of six or seven points. I'm assuming a 3 point Democratic edge, and even that is very likely an overstatement.
Karl Rove on Bill O'Reilly, transcript via Fox News:
O'REILLY: . . . Are these polls dishonest?
ROVE: No. Look, we endow them with a false scientific precision they simply don't have. If you've got nine points more Democrats than Republicans and you're nine points more --
(CROSSTALK)
O'REILLY: You you're going to have a poll that reflects that.
ROVE: -- yes, nine points more Obama. Think about this. Romney and Obama get each roughly the same percentage of Republicans and Democrats as -- as their opponent. That is to say they carry their -- their base overwhelmingly. Romney, among Independents is winning by three points.
So -- so if Romney is winning the Independents and winning the Republicans do you think in a battle ground state like Florida, he's nine points down and the answer is no....
ROVE: . . . So look, we've got to be careful about, you know, we have a proliferation of these polls. There have been 87 national polls in the last 30 days. That's more polls than were run in the last six months of the 1980 presidential race.
O'REILLY: All right.
ROVE: Last week -- last week alone, we had 51 state level polls; and the week before that, 41.
O'REILLY: I understand that but -- but here -- here -- look, from my point of view as a news analyst and I believe that the folks know I'm honest in that regard, when news agencies like the CBS News on the radio report the polling and it shows that Barack Obama has leapt out to a big lead in Florida and Ohio, that gets inside people's minds. They remember that. And that can only help the President. That helps the President.
ROVE: Sure.
O'REILLY: Because the perception is he is going to be the winner.
. . . . . . O'REILLY: All right, real quick, real quick, your board, the Karl Rove board where is the race in Ohio and Florida in your opinion?
ROVE: Well, toss-up in both states.
O'REILLY: Toss-up? It could go either way at this point in history.
ROVE: Sure.
O'REILLY: All right, Mr. Rove. We appreciate that.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fox's laughable case for Romney
. . . Rove's role is nuttily professorial. He has adopted one of those erasable white slates popularized by the late Tim Russert. On it he scribbles integers with plus or minus signs. These, he alleges, are the amounts being added to President Barack Obama and/or subtracted from Romney by such daredevil organizations as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, CNN, Gallup and the co-opted poll-averagers at the website RealClearPolitics. Bottom line: This vast conspiracy is downgrading Romney three to nine points by using screens that overstate the votes of blacks, Latinos, Asians, women and the young.
Morris, who is beginning to bear a waxen resemblance to Orson Welles, explained, I think, that pollsters cheat by using false baseline figures from previous elections. Morris didn't have time to explicate fully how every news organization except Fox has signed up to help Obama by disseminating these cooked figures. Even so, O'Reilly thanked Morris for explaining polling mysteries he said he had not previously understood.
. . . I think there's a secret behind O'Reilly's trademark smirk. Were it in his interest to say what's on his mind about the candidates' performance to date, he'd almost certainly admit that Obama has come on like a superstar candidate of the Reagan ilk, and so far Romney is one of the biggest duds in post-World War II presidential elections.
~ Howell Raines on CNN
Conservative blogger Dean Chambers ... analyzed these polls favoring President Obama, and then reached the scientific conclusion that they "just didn't look right." So Chambers set up his own polling site, "UnskewedPolls.com," where he unskewed all the national polls by skewing them in favor of Romney - and surprisingly found that Mitt had nearly an 8 point lead! And that doesn't even count the margin of error.
And given how many errors Romney's made, I think he should get all of it.
No surprise, folks, this "feels accurate" polling has caught the attention of some GOP intellectuals, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, who tweeted: "Always nice to get unfiltered, or in this case unskewed, information." Amen! If we had only had more accurate polling during the primaries, Perry could have dropped out way sooner.
~ Stephen Colbert
GOP partisans shouldn’t worry about a conspiracy. They should worry that this is a snapshot of how Americans feel about the two major parties.
It’s not the polls, it’s the policies. Now that’s a reason for Republicans to be depressed.
~ Eugene Robinson on The Moderate Voice
After four years of relentlessly condemning Obama as an historic failure and all around bad person, conservatives are desperately trying to explain the disconnect between their dire Obama denunciations and the on-the-ground political reality about Obama's polling surge. They need a scapegoat, and pollsters have been cast in the role.
. . . An Obama victory will confirm that bloggers and talk shows hosts were right all along because the skewed polls worked (as the conspiracy intended) and drained Republican enthusiasm. And that's why Obama won re-election: Not enough Republicans voted!
~ Eric Boehlert on Media Matters
The funniest prank that Fox News plays on viewers occurs every other night, when freelance strategist Dick Morris -- a former Clintonite who now despises Democrats -- lurches in front of a camera and explains that Republicans will win everything.
. . . According to Morris, literally 100 percent of "undecided" voters will eventually vote against Barack Obama. Leaving aside how the theory ignores spillover to write-ins and third-party candidates, this is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Nate Silver, bless him, has already explained why the "incumbent rule" doesn't actually exist.
. . . There's literally no evidence that undecided voters will break the way he says they're breaking. But he's telling an audience of voters -- and more importantly for him, potential consumers -- that the media is covering up how Mitt Romney's winning the election. It's silly, and at the same time it lays the ground for endless paranoia if Romney doesn't win.
~ David Weigel on Slate
It's all about the enemy. Of course it starts with the media, starts with the liberal media. The liberal media wants Mitt Romney to lose, its in Barack Obama's back pocket, so on, and so forth. Now it extends to the pollsters. Pollsters are supposedly riggin' these things.
Nobody's rigging anything. Nobody. In fact what the polls are showing is that fewer and fewer people who are being called by pollsters want to call themselves Republicans.
~ Michael Tomasky of Daily Beast on Hardball
Why would anybody ever ever ever, I don't care who pays them, ever listen to what Dick Morris has to say about anything? Especially when he says 'all the polls' including Fox's own polls are not to be trusted because he doesn't like the numbers. He doesn't like what they're saying this week.
~ ~ Chris Matthews on Hardball
You imagine that back in the Republican Green Room there's this giant crack pipe that they are all hitting on constantly - hittin' it hard! . . . Dick Morris bought the pipe!
. . . The rank and file literally believe some of this nonsense. They believe that evolution didn't happen, global warming's a hoax, Obama's a Kenyan, But people like Dick Morris, and Sean Hannity for that matter, who've spread alot of this propaganda, they know better than this! And there's a method to their madness here. They're not delusional, their dishonest. They're not crazy, they're craven.
What they're trying to do and accomplish is to say in advance that if President Obama wins this election, it's because the pollsters suppress the Republican vote. It's therefore an illegimate election, he's not really President. They're settin' the table for that.
~ Ron Reagan on Hardball
. . . reputable national polls out there, show that Obama is ahead in most of these key battleground states. That's obviously disconcerting to a lot of Republicans. Some of them, like Karl Rove, for example, have repeatedly gone out there and suggested that these polls are biased against the Republicans because they're oversampling Democrats, for example, as opposed to Republicans. And as a result, don't trust these polls, they're not reliable. So it's sort of convenient for a lot of these Republicans, like Karl Rove, to go after the NBC poll or the ABC poll or CNN polls.
But what they don't say is that the FOX News polls are showing almost exactly the same thing. FOX has some good polls. . . . You don't hear them complaining about the FOX News polls. They're complaining about the others, so there is an imbalance there.
~ Wolf Blitzer on CNN
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