Mitt Rubio

It looks like Greg Sargent was right. Marco Rubio didn't offer any real alternatives to ideas laid out by President Obama last night. The Gulp Heard 'Round the World is getting a lot of coverage today and Rubio can be thankful of that. It's not really all that embarrassing and it probably won't affect his political future, while his response might've otherwise.

What Rubio did lay out was a perfect imitation of the Mitt Romney campaign platform -- and a perfect example of what's really wrong with the GOP. It was all tax cuts and small government and abortion and drill baby, drill. Americans didn't like this record the last time it was played, it's not likely they're going to like it any better now. Set the biographical introduction aside and the rest was just complaining.

It's convincing evidence that Republicans think their problems are all cosmetic. Prior to the election, Republicans defended attacks on minorities as proof that they weren't willing to "pander" to them -- as if not ignoring someone's concerns is some sort of a kiss-up and not responsive government. Choosing Rubio to deliver the Republican response shows that Republicans are now ready to pander, but that this whole "responsive government" thing is just going a step too far for them. Pandering is all you're going to get. It represents an apparent belief that Mitt Romney lost because he wasn't a somber-faced Latino in a serious dark suit, not because Americans rejected his proposals. Republicans continue to make the mistake of thinking that Americans rejected the packaging, not the same tired, old, unappetizing slop inside it. Marco Rubio is just the latest "new and improved!" sticker slapped on the party, without any attempt whatsoever to change the party in any substantial way at all. The sticker is the only change -- and it is, of course, a lie.

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The Opposition (to Everything) Party

If you know a rightwing blogger, you might want to check in on them occasionally, to make sure they haven't opened a vein. The mood in the wingnut blogosphere -- as it was on rightwing Twitter last night -- is one of comically exaggerated doom. What happened on Fox News, when Karl Rove absolutely refused to believe that the president had won Ohio (and with it, reelection), is surprisingly not the norm this morning. I suppose they're in shock and may begin waving their "unskewed" polls around and shrieking that Obama stole the election once they've recovered a bit. But for now, it's all about depression. Over at Breitbart.com, the faithful are being consoled with tales of the popular vote and Obama's failure to gain it, but that particular solace is unlikely to even survive the day -- CNN already has the President at 50% and climbing as of this writing.

So what things should conservatives have learned from last night that they don't seem to be? There are a lot; don't pick fights with Nate Silver over math, don't pick fights with women over rape, don't assume your little Fox News/talk radio bubble isn't lying to you about your chances and making you way too complacent, etc. But the big one is that "divide and conquer" only works when you're dividing off the bigger portion to yourselves.

Politico:

...“The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who will immediately be looked to as a potential 2016 presidential candidate.

But the GOP’s problem is more fundamental than one bloc of voters. For the second consecutive presidential election, the Republican got thumped among women and young voters in the states that decided the election.

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Romney's Excellent Argument Against Electing Romney

The election campaign is pretty much over. There's some scrambling to be done here or there. A last minute effort to get to those few last voters who may not be undecided, but are unmotivated and still unsure whether voting this year will be worth their time. And that's who the post is aimed at; that voter, perhaps tired of the bitter partisan divide and disgusted with how dirty politics has become, who doesn't think voting will make any difference.

There are plenty of posts out there today -- and many more to be published before the election is over -- that spell out what life under a President Romney would be like. Juan Cole has such a post up now and it's worth a read. But Romney's been so inconsistent in his pitch that it really is impossible to predict exactly how he'll govern. I think he will be a plutocrat who believes that 47% of America is beneath his notice, mostly because his history -- both in the private and public sector -- is one of exactly that. But he's such a flip-flopper and a liar that you can't say with any certainty how he'll govern. And it may be that how he governs would be less consequential than how he got elected.

See, if we really want to know what the consequence is of electing Mitt Romney, we can look at his closing argument. In it, he reveals not so much about himself as of his party -- and it's damningly familiar. In his closing argument last Friday, Mitt Romney took the American people hostage.

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Romney's Running Out of Time

Election week began -- appropriately or inappropriately, depending on your point of view -- on Halloween. There are now less than seven days until the election. For Mitt Romney, the sentence, "There's still time to turn this thing around," gets more and more untrue with each passing hour. Signs of his desperation abound. The Cleveland Plain Dealer describes him "flailing" in Ohio, "recklessly" telling lies about Chrysler moving jobs to China. A company spokesperson said that Romney's Chrysler-Jeep story was "a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats." Meanwhile, tick-tock.

At the same time, the Republican nominee is dusting off his old -- and just as thoroughly debunked -- welfare lie.

CNN:

Mitt Romney's campaign has brought back a widely-discredited welfare claim in a new television ad, one week before Election Day.

In the ad--which was unannounced by the campaign but posted Tuesday on Romney's YouTube site–the narrator lists the "gutting" of the work requirement in welfare as one of President Barack Obama's so-called failed policies in his first term.

Along with high unemployment and a rise in food stamps, the Romney ad paints Obama as a threat to future generations.

"We may have made it through President Obama's first term," the narrator concludes, as footage of children are featured on the screen. "It's our children who cannot afford a second."

Politifact rated Romney's take on welfare and work requirements as "pants on fire" -- a cute way of saying the man is a blatant liar.

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Mitt Rebrands Campaign Rallies as 'Storm Relief Efforts'

If New Jersey Governor Chris Christie got an email from the Romney campaign this morning, you could probably boil it down to three words: "You're not helping."

In the wake of former hurricane and now current "superstorm" Sandy, Christie has been all over the media talking about what an awesome job President Obama and the federal government have been doing in dealing with the crisis. "The federal government's response has been great," Christie told Today. "I was on the phone at midnight again last night with the president, personally, he has expedited the designation of New Jersey as a major disaster area," adding that "the president has been outstanding in this."

Later, he told Joe Scarborough that "the president has been all over this and deserves great credit." We already know what Mitt Romney think would be the ideal federal response to this sort of thing -- none. For Mitt, responding to natural disaster means deficit spending, so helping people is "simply immoral" in his worldview. Christie's praise of Obama does double damage to Mitt's message.

Here's Romney's idea of disaster relief:

The Hill:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan scheduled "storm relief" events Tuesday after previously canceling planned campaign rallies.

Romney will attend an event in Kettering, Ohio, Tuesday morning with race car driver Richard Petty and country music artist Randy Owen. He had previously scheduled a campaign rally at the same site with Petty, Owen, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Tuesday afternoon, but later scrapped the campaign events out of deference to those in the path of Hurricane Sandy.

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Team Romney Tries One Last Desperate Lie

Yesterday, I wrote a Tumblr post titled, "Is the '12 presidential race essentially over?" In it, I pointed out that pollsters and analysts have been describing a pretty static race for a while now and that Barack Obama was favored to win. "It’s a little more than a week to the election, there are like five undecided voters left in the country..." I wrote, "Nothing left to do but sit on the edge of the bed and try not to wrinkle your suit while you wait for your big election night date."

The Romney ad above seems to back up my argument. Currently running in Ohio, Taegan Goddard calls the ad "a fairly clear indication -- despite surrogates claiming Romney is now leading in Ohio -- that he's more likely running behind as the polling averages show." Why? Because it's pretty much a complete reversal of the story he's been telling Ohioans, while being a steaming pile of BullsMitt.

ThinkProgress counts "four myths" in the Romney ad. The one that leaped out at me was "Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy." This from the guy wrote wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." The rest are about as egregious, that just struck me as the most glaringly obvious.

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Reality Does Not Care for Your 'Momentum' Narrative

I guess my physics are a little rusty. Can momentum be the same as downward velocity? If so, Mitt Romney has plenty of momentum. It's just not the kind I'd spend a lot of time bragging about, if I were a Romney-ite. Because that red line in the FiveThirtyEight forecast? That's Mitt. And you'll notice that the trend there isn't the sort of momentum that screams, "Behold our coming electoral triumph!"

Yet "momentum" is the newest aspect of poll trutherism. I've already written about Silver trutherism, which would demand you deny that FiveThirtyEight graphic's validity. Now we have backers of what Ed Kilgore calls "the Big Mo" claiming -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that Mitt Romney has momentum and is poised to crush Barack Obama any minute now. And it's that lack of evidence that I find most disturbing.

Poll trutherism at least has some tether to reality. If you'll recall, poll truthers look at polling that shows Mitt Romney down, assume the demographics are way off, then "fix" the sampling to favor Romney. Presto-chango, Mitt's winning by huge margins. Backers of the Big Mo narrative aren't even doing that. They're looking at polling that under the most charitable interpretation shows Mitt Romney's numbers flattening out and they're declare a long rise in his numbers that simply is not there.

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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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Looking for the 'Horses and Bayonets' Bounce

That Google graphic is really all you need if you want to learn who won the debate last night. Snap polling is unreliable, but the consensus seems to be that Obama won. CNN's poll gives it to Obama, 48%-40%. Public Policy Polling's results [pdf] were more stark, with a 53%-42% Obama win. And CBS News reports an absolute blowout: 53% Obama to 23% Romney. Yeah, that's a two -- as in twenty-three.

But it's the fact that everyone's searching the "horses and bayonets" line that confirms these findings. That wasn't exactly a Romney gaffe, but it's sort of a gaffe that Obama forced on him. One of the few foreign policy positions that Romney didn't completely reverse himself on last night was his promise to throw $2 trillion at our already bloated military and build ships the Navy hasn't requested. And Obama whacked him for it:

But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works.

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

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Mitt's Deflated Foreign Policy

Hey look, it's giant metaphor for Mitt Romney's foreign policy positions ahead of tonight's presidential debate:

An airship promoting Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Florida drew attention for other reasons Sunday when it was forced to make an emergency landing just north of Miami.

According to WSVN-TV, the blimp, bearing the banner, “America Needs Romney,” was caught in high winds on its way back to a local airport, forcing it to the ground near a residential area in Davie, Florida.

“It was getting lower and lower,” one resident said. “It was totally going down, it was just losing altitude. The wind was just taking it and taking it.”

Team Romney took a double-whammy this weekend, as the Obama administration announced a major diplomatic breakthrough with Iran and the Republican version of the Benghazi attack collapsed under the weight of reality. Their foreign policy blimp went crashing down. Team Romney is furiously trying to spin good news into bad, but I seriously doubt anyone other than the base will bite. As is so often the case, good news for America is bad news for the GOP -- which means this weekend was a disaster for them.

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Mitt's Final Debate Strategy: Be a Dick Again

If you think Team Romney are secure in their belief that they're running away with the election, you'll probably have to reassess after reading this story from The Hill:

Mitt Romney's campaign indicated Wednesday they have no plans to rein in the GOP nominee during the third and final presidential debate.

Romney's aggressive performance Tuesday night — directly challenging President Obama and quarreling with moderator Candy Crowley — had Democrats and even some Republicans arguing he came across as too assertive, which could turn off undecided voters.

But Team Romney claims their candidate won the night with his argument on core economic issues, which are the leading concern among voters. And Republican strategists say that Romney has more leeway to adopt the role of the antagonist because it's Obama who is so heavily reliant on personal favorability to buoy his poll numbers.

That last part doesn't make a lot of sense: apparently the argument is that people like Barack Obama, which is why it's OK to try to slap him around a bit. Voters will really get into that. People love it when you sink your fangs into someone they like.

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Not a Good Night for Mitt Romney

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.
-President Barack Obama, remarks on the deaths of US embassy staff in Benghazi, delivered in the Rose Garden on September 12, 2012.

It's the moment that will probably be best remembered from last night's debate. Mitt Romney took the opportunity to once again exploit the deaths of Americans for political gain -- and got it all balled up and wrong. Kevin Drum has the exchange (full transcript here):

ROMNEY: I think it's interesting the president just said something, which — which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.

OBAMA: That’s what I said.

ROMNEY: You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?

OBAMA: Please proceed governor.

When the president told Romney to "please proceed," he clearly saw where this was heading. He might as well have said, "You go ahead and take all the rope you think you need." Then came all the beauty:

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See How Much Romney-Ryan Love the 47%? See? See?

On the off-chance that you're not familiar with the what I'm going to call the Youngstown Clean Pot Massacre, here's the skinny. If you are familiar with the story and don't need a refresher, go ahead and skip the following blockquote. Frankly though, I found the real-world absurdism of the story almost as hilarious the second time around.

Mediaite:

Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is in hotter water than it takes to wash dishes that are already clean over his ill-advised Saturday photo-op at a Youngstown, Ohio, soup kitchen. After pool reporters revealed that Ryan’s visit to the St. Vincent De Paul Society Dining Hall consisted of washing dishes that were already clean, and after the hall had emptied, the president of the charity blasted the Ryan campaign for “ramrodd(ing) their way” into the soup kitchen, and added that ““The photo-op they did wasn’t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”

On Monday night’s The Ed Show, host Ed Schultz tore into Ryan over the artifice involved in his visit to the soup kitchen, which included washing dishes that were already clean, and later speaking only for still cameras, not reporters, with some people who “appeared to be homeless,” wondering just what Ryan could have been saying to them.

“I wonder what Ryan told those men he talked to,” Ed fumed. “He probably didn’t tell them he plans to turn Medicaid into a block grant program, to voucherize Medicare, to slash billions from food assistance programs.”

Brian J. Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society, took the Romney-Ryan campaign to the woodshed last night over the incident. Soup kitchens are not for photo ops, he said. "We're a faith-based organization; we are apolitical because the majority of our funding is from private donations," Antal told the Washington Post. "It's strictly in our bylaws not to do it. They showed up there, and they did not have permission. They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors."

So Ryan walks into a clean kitchen, pulls clean pots and pans out of the cupboards, and pretends to scrub-a-dub-dub. He puts the kitchen's fundraising at risk, by making the organization running it seem partisan and seem to endorse Romney-Ryan. And it's all so hamhanded and transparent that reporters can't help but figure out what's going on right away. The Youngstown Clean Pot Massacre was not a carefully planned out operation.

So the question is, why? Why stage this photo-op at all?

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Logic Dictates that Mitt Romney's One of Two Kinds of Sick

There are times when Mitt Romney's clearly just lying and there are times when you wonder if he just has no idea what the hell he's talking about. I'm hoping that the following, given in a interview with The Columbus Dispatch, is an example of Romney lying; because if this is an example of Mitt's ignorance, he's got a lot of explaining to do. The quote comes by way of ThinkProgress and the emphasis is theirs:

“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’  ” he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of “Obamacare,” which he has pledged to repeal.

“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

He pointed out that federal law requires hospitals to treat those without health insurance — although hospital officials frequently say that drives up health-care costs.

That statement is at odds with this report from a little over a year ago, about an incident in the city of Cincinnati, state of Reality. This time, the emphasis is mine:

ABC News:

A 24-year-old Cincinnati father died from a tooth infection this week because he couldn't afford his medication, offering a sobering reminder of the importance of oral health and the number of people without access to dental or health care.

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Settle Down, Obama's Still the Favorite

People I respect and think are well worth listening to seem to all have the same four words for Andrew Sullivan: "Settle the f**k down." On the subject of a debate which resulted in what was most likely a Romney bounce, Sullivan posted a piece he titled, "Did Obama Just Throw the Entire Election Away?" If it were a blogger who got less traffic on a regular basis, I'd suspect link baiting. But Sullivan is no slouch for eyes on ads, so it's clearly histrionic hyperbole and blind animal panic.

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 - 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 - 45 lead. That’s a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama’s performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing...

For his part, Ed Kilgore says that Sullivan is guilty of confirmation bias. "He is someone who clearly thought the first presidential debate was a disaster at the time, and is now freaking out because he’s seeing confirmation of his worst fears," he writes. "So telling him that this is just one poll (or two polls counting PPP’s new survey showing Romney up by two points among LVs) won’t cut much ice, since he’s now expecting others to show the same confirmation of his own impressions of a catastrophic debate defeat for Obama."

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Post-Debate Bounce Not as Big a Story as Everyone's Pretending

I was pretty busy last week and didn't get a chance to write anything substantial about the first presidential debate. By now, it's old news and I won't bore you with yet another rehashing of a debacle; suffice it to say that Mitt Romney flung the BS fast and furious and this is enough to get you declared a winner of a debate these days. When I was in high school, debaters had to cite facts. Apparently adults running for office get to be much more creative and the media will actually applaud lying.

So what's the damage here? Reports have it that Romney is climbing in the polls, momentum's behind him, and the world is his oyster. He's definitely going to be the next president of the United States and, if you check FiveThirtyEight, you'll see that he's now projected to have a 78.4% of winning to President Obama's 21.6%.

Oh wait, that's all backwards and wrong; Obama's 78.4% and Romney's 21.6%. Further it's starting to look like Romney's topped out, so his chances aren't going to get any better. According to FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, "polls released on Sunday did not tell quite as optimistic a story for him as those in the debate’s immediate aftermath." He also calls Romney's current polling a "bounce."

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GOP Hired the Right Crook for the Voter Suppression Job

It should be a scandal eclipsing Mitt's 47-percent comments -- but it's not.

Raw Story:

The Republican National Committee fired a voter registration firm owned by a paid consultant to the party’s presidential candidate Mitt Romney Thursday, after Florida officials traced more than 100 possibly fake registration forms back to the company.

NBC News reported that the RNC cut ties with Strategic Allied Consulting (SAC), run by party strategist Nathan Sproul, had been paid $2.9 million this year to register voters in five swing states before being dismissed.

Sproul is also the founder and managing partner of another company, Lincoln Strategy Group, which records show was paid by the Romney campaign paid to do “field consulting.”

The Romney campaign told NBC News, "We used this vendor for signature gathering services during the primary but have not used them since 2011." The question should be why Romney or the RNC hired Sproul at all. The man should be washed up and unemployable in the voter registration business -- or in anything to do with elections.

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All Things to All People, President to None

Mitt Romney is now reduced to begging people to believe he gives a crap. Limping along with a self-inflicted wound across 47% of its body, the Romney campaign has released a new ad assuring America that their candidate isn't a psychopath and is capable of human emotion. "Compassionate conservatism" again enters the conversation and again causes some to ask why the word "compassionate" must be added to the word "conservatism." Modern conservatives tend to leave the compassion out of their politics. Remember how terrible they argued empathy was?

Just as Republicans apparently prefer unfeeling automatons as judges, who'll hand down verdicts and rulings without caring whose lives they ruin, so they apparently (or at least naturally) prefer the same sort of robotic coldness in their politicians. Consider their love for "tough talkers" who tell "hard truths" and "make the tough decisions." You know, guys like Paul Ryan. What they're really saying in all this is that they need people who'll do what they think needs to be done and who don't care who they offend or screw over. The emotionless psychopath is the perfect conservative leader, just as it's the perfect conservative judge.

And that fact, combined with Mitt Romney's current emo-trouble, brings up a very interesting question: can a candidate appeal to the Tea Party base and the general electorate and go on to win national office? So far, that's looking like a no. Romney had to go behind the scenes to rip on freeloaders and welfare queens. Now that it's right out there, his big chore is convincing everyone he didn't mean it. He's even throwing the anti-healthcare reform people under the bus.

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Big Trouble for Mitt Romney

This is not good news for Team Romney.

Quinnipiac:

President Barack Obama is over the magic 50 percent mark and tops Gov. Mitt Romney among likely voters by 9 to 12 percentage points in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to a Quinnipiac University/ CBS News/New York Times Swing State Poll released today.

Voters in each state see President Obama as better than Gov. Romney to handle the economy, health care, Medicare, national security, an international crisis and immigration. Romney ties or inches ahead of the president on handling the budget deficit.

Matching Obama against Romney in each of these key states - no one has won the White House since 1960 without taking at least two of them...

In this race, Mitt Romney needs -- absolutely needs -- Ohio and Florida to win. MSNBC's First Read notes that Romney begins a bus tour today that "has to do more than stop the bleeding for Romney in Ohio; it has to be the beginning of a turnaround for him in this state. Losing Ohio isn’t checkmate, but it’s close." Losing Florida and Ohio? That is checkmate -- and Mitt can't tour both states at once. So he seems to be piling all his chips on Ohio.

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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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