-By Warner Todd Huston
Suddenly Yahoo! News wants you all to know that all those darned old polls showing a big Romney surge are “meaningless at this stage in the election.” That’s right, are you going to believe Yahoo! or your lying eyes?
For Yahoo! News, David Rothschild says that we should just ignore the polls. Obama is the big winner and that is that. Move along. Nothing to see here.
The reason Rothschild says the national polls are meaningless is because, thanks to the Electoral College, our system isn’t a national vote, per se. Rothschild is focusing only on the key swing states that he says are the only ones worth paying any attention to. And he feels all the swing states are in Obama’s column so forget what the national polls say.
Naturally, Rothschild favors the left-wing Nate Silver of The New York Times who has consistently claimed that Obama will practically run away with this election despite the fact that some of the most reputable polling organizations in the country such as Rasmussen and Gallup have shown a close race all along.
Yahoo! isn’t the only outlet suddenly trying to downplay polls. Politico also did its fair share to dampen any possible Mittmentum by phoo phooing the polls.
A recent Gallup survey found that Romney has at least a 6 point lead in candidate preference for both those who intend to vote and those that have already taken advantage of early voting in their state.
The Gallup poll of 3,300 likely voters found that among those that have already early voted, 46% voted for Obama and 52% voted for Mitt Romney. As Ed Morrissey notes, Obama had a 15 point lead in early voting back in 2008. This is quite a reversal as things stand today.
Yet, Politico “reported” this Romney advantage saying, “Neither candidate has an edge among early voters nationally,” despite that the poll clearly shows a Romney advantage. Even if you take away three points for the margin of error, Romney is still leading Obama in this poll. It is hardly a draw.
The Old Media must be desperate to help Obama win if after an entire year of living and dying by the polls, they are suddenly saying we should ignore them.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
All I can say is, “LOL!”