Poll Trutherism's Dumber Sibling

I suppose it's a predictable offshoot of poll trutherism -- the popular rightwing conspiracy theory that has every pollster skewing numbers to make Mitt Romney look bad when the numbers are down. And when those polls show Romney up, then they're fine. The idea is that pollsters are trying convince Republicans that the cause is lost, so they'll stay home on election day. The new one isn't any saner. We'll call this one Silver trutherism -- the idea that Nate Silver, the statistician behind the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog, is likewise trying to use his predictions to throw the election for Obama.

The reason Silver trutherism is happening is pretty obvious. The right has joined with the Romney campaign in trying to create an illusion of Romney momentum. It's not true of course. At this point, no one has any momentum; opinions are pretty well fixed and there are like five undecided voters in the entire country. There's no reason to think that where we are now isn't pretty much where we'll be on election day. There's some movement among individual polls, but unless you're cherrypicking, they all even out. But you can cherrypick polls, blare triumphant headlines about them on your wingnut blogs, and hope someone in the media notices and runs with the story. This is what the right has been trying to pull off for Romney.

But Nate Silver is a problem because he's respected. He and others like him are the clear-eyed pragmatists who put the brakes on "runaway Mittmentum!" stories in the press. The wingnut blogosphere could easily game a press eager to be gamed if it weren't for those meddling statisticians with their science and their math. Something must be done.

So something was. Led by that hoary publication of downward-spiraling reputation, The National Review, the attack on Nate Silver began. Even sillier bloggers followed suit. But the problem with this line of attack is that Nate Silver isn't the only guy with a statistical model out there -- he's just the most famous. And a quick trip through a few of them shows that, far from skewing everything in Obama's favor, Nate Silver is actually lowballing Obama's chances in comparisons with other models.

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Ignorance Becomes a Political Tactic

The Republican break with reality is nearly complete. From the historic failure if trickle-down economics to global warming to evolution to the fact you don't choose to be gay, conservatives have been waging a War with Reality for years. And it's the nature of that war that the believe they're winning, despite the fact that they can't possibly. I wrote about an aspect of it yesterday, but that was before this story broke on Buzzfeed:

Republicans have taken their complaints about media polls allegedly favoring Democrats a step further this morning, embracing an obscure new polling website that re-engineers public polls to add more Republicans to their samples, and which gives Republican Mitt Romney a wide lead.

Some Romney supporters have long complained that public polls suggest higher Democratic turnout, and lower Republican turnout, than they think is likely this year. Pollsters have replied that their samples are dictated by what poll respondents themselves say. (This exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Lee Miringoff is illustrative of the argument.)

Dean Chambers, a blogger on Examiner.com who writes from his home in Duffield, Virginia, took that complaint a step further — producing wide Romney leads far beyond what the Republican's campaign or Republican pollsters have suggested is the case.

The site -- unskewedpolls.com -- is of course made entirely of the purest, most highly refined BS. Basically, he takes polling samples that are the most favorable to Republicans, then applies those percentages to other polls. In other words, if he believes the poll oversamples Democrats, he subtracts a percentage of dem respondents and adds a percentage of GOP ones. As you can imagine, this changes everything radically. Buzzfeed posted a Chambers chart from yesterday and Romney leads in a spread of +3 to +10.

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No Rightwing Blogosphere, Everything is Not Fine

The electoral math seems daunting. As of today and based on state polling averages, Talking Points Memo gives President Obama 313 electoral votes to Mitt Romney's 191. Electoral-Vote.com is more generous in handing out leaners and has it 328 Obama, 206 Romney. Finally, Real Clear Politics has the numbers as 247 Obama, 191 Romney. While 270 electoral votes are needed to win and Obama falls short of that mark in almost everyone's count, Romney has a lot more ground to cover.

And it's clear that Romney's the one losing steam here. After pretty much writing off women, Latinos, gays, Muslims, African-Americans, etc., he's finding constituencies he's relying on slipping away as well. Older voters, concerned with Paul Ryan's Medicare-slaying plans, have moved away from Mitt. Romney's support among the 60-plus crowd has dropped from a 20-point lead to four -- in the past two weeks. He's hemorrhaging seniors. More telling, the Republican candidate is now losing among NASCAR fans -- 48%-41%. This is a group of mostly southern whites who can normally be counted on breaking Republican. All the news for the GOP is soulcrushingly bad -- until you look closely, then it's even worse.

I say that because The American Conservative's Noah Millman takes that close look at the race and sees disaster -- not only for their presidential candidate, but for the Republican Party as a whole. The turning point was the conventions and things have just kept going south since then.

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The Paranoid Mindset of the Rightwing Blogosphere

Blogger will be in read-only mode while we resolve some maintenance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you'd checked Google's Blogger Status on Thursday, you'd have found that message. When I found that I wasn't able to access my blogs to publish a post, the first thing I did was check Status. Google was down and it was confirmed. I would have to wait. Patiently or impatiently, I was going to have to wait.

One thing that I've learned about the internet over the years -- and have come to accept -- is that it doesn't really work. Not very well, anyway. Services are unreliable. Connections can be spotty. Machines break down and code, being written and configured by humans, can be faulty. In the early years, Blogger wasn't super reliable. But over time it's developed into a pretty solid and stable platform. This latest outage was the exception to the rule.

Others haven't learned that the internet doesn't really work. And those people went nuts. I cringed reading some comments on the Blogger Help forum. Another thing to remember when dealing with Blogger is that it's free. Pretty much the only thing Google does to make money off it is to make it easy to add Adsense ads. You get unlimited bandwidth and an infinite amount of blog posts for nothing. Let me emphasize that fact -- nothing. Yet people were "demanding" that their blogs be restored to their previous functional state, as if engineers were just sitting around waiting for someone to tell them to get on the ball. It was embarrassing. I'd imagine that many a middle finger was raised at many a monitor at Google's Blogger division this weekend.

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