The Wingnuts are Not Handling This Well

Obama is rising in most polls, and has started to take a substantial lead over Mitt Romney in recent weeks. Wingnuts are dealing with this development as rationally as you'd expect, and have created a website that recalculates the polls until Mitt Romney is winning:

I present UnSkewedPolls.com, the best new website on the political Internet. UnSkewed Polls finally removes the “liberal media bias” from every single national opinion poll, and it turns out that “unskewing” them means “making it so that Romney is ahead by a lot.” Rick Perry approves!

The UnSkewed Average has Romney at 51.8 percent and Obama at a mere 44 percent. How does the genius behind UnSkewed Polls go about unskewing all the polls — like, for real, the vast majority of polls — that show the opposite result? Well, Dean Chambers, the polling genius behind the site, simply “re-weights” every single national poll to reflect his belief that Republicans are undersampled, based on right-leaning pollster Rasmussen’s partisan breakdown of the electorate. (Scott Rasmussen blurbs: “you cannot compare partisan weighting from one polling firm to another.”)

And obviously “re-weighting” every single poll to reflect an electorate made up of a plurality of self-identified Republicans also involves a bit of guesswork! Like, for example, sometimes polls don’t include crosstabs, so Mr. Unskewed just assumes they’re skewed with liberal media bias, and corrects accordingly.

. . .

Meanwhile, in reality, Nate Silver says late-September polls have a pretty good track record of predicting the winner of the race, if not the margin. In the cases of the two elections this one has been most often compared to: President Carter was down 3.4 percent in September 1980, and lost by 9.8. President Bush was up 4.5 percent in September 2004, and won by 2.4.

In fact, at this point you have to look pretty hard for examples of underdogs pulling it out: “Of the 19 candidates who led in the polls at this stage since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey).” But all of those polls and electoral results were skewed, by liberal media bias.

Thought: If you're reduced to making up polling numbers until your guy is winning, that is probably not a good sign.