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HappySqurriel on 18 September 2012
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nuckles87 said:

This is what people always do when their candidate is losing: blame the pollsters.

There is no oversampling going on towards the democrats in these polls. Polling these days is an incredibly exact science that relies heavily on past trends, and typically has a very solid track record. I encourage you to just follow www.fivethirtyeight.com. They are the best polling aggregate out there, and where dead on in both 2008 and 2010. They are going to be dead on in 2012 to.

The only poll that is "over sampling" anything is Rasmussen, which over samples Republicans. Their polling methedology expects republicans to turn out +3 over democrats or independents, which has not happened once in the modern history of polling. It is this polling methedology that lead them to somehow overestimate the historic gains in 2010 (!?), and it's causing them to overestimate the republican's chances this cycle too.

Fivethirtyeight is giving us the most accurate picture here, and things aren't looking pretty for Romney. They are  only going to get worse.

In 2011 Gallup polling found that 31% of Americans identified as Democrats, and 27% identified as Republicans; and in June of 2012 Rassmussen found 35% identified as Republicans and 34% identified as Democrats. Last Friday the New York Times and CBS produced a poll that assumed the Democrats had a D+13 advantage and had Obama leading by 8%. Being that the best the Democrats ever did was in 2010 and got a D+7 it is unlikely they will see D+13.

If it was one or two polls I wouldn't think twice about it, but it seems like every poll has an unexplained extreme skew in favour of the Democrats.

I do check Fivethirtyeight but all they do is aggregate polls, and the flaws of the underlying polls are still persisted.

 

I wouldn't care that much about it but I have seen several elections in the last few years where public opinion polling has been dramatically wrong; and the media has claimed that the cause of this was a last minute change in opinion, or problems polling in the modern age, where I'm starting to think that polls are being produced today to fit the narrative the media wants to portray.