Presidential Polls 2012: Skewed Polling and Biased Media Coverage Give Obama False Advantage Over Romney

From its double standard on how the mainstream media has covered both campaigns, to the 2008-Democrat heavy polling models they use, to the lack of investigative reporting on the scandals associated with this administration, it has become blatantly evident that the mainstream media harbors a liberal bias, commits endless hypocrisies and will not hold this president up to the same standards it has for previous presidents.

Campaign Coverage

I find the messaging from both campaigns to be remarkably stunning. Despite both candidates being Harvard graduates and worth millions of dollars each, one is labeled as “out of touch” with mainstream America by the elitist New York news media, Hollywood celebrities and Washington insiders (as if they have any idea what’s “in touch” with mainstream America) while the other is not as he hosts $40,000-a-plate fundraisers and hob nobs on talk shows with these same millionaire celebrities and media personalities.

Furthermore, while the Romney campaign has kept its messaging solely focused on Obama’s record as president, his policies and his results, the Obama campaign has launched into personal character attacks against Romney, accusing him of waging a war on women, of being a felon by not paying his taxes, and even murdering a steel worker’s wife.

For its part, the mainstream media has done a thorough job covering Romney’s past, including tracing his family’s history all the way back to their Mexican roots, his father having once been on public aid, and the personal lifestyles of Mitt, his wife Anne, and their five sons.

But where was the mainstream media on Obama’s family history and professional career? Did you know that his grandparents deliberately moved to Mercer Island, Washington so that they could enroll his mother into the only openly Marxist school in America? Did you know that communist radical Frank Marshall Davis was chosen by his grandfather to be his political mentor? Did you know that he hasn’t released any of his personal records from his college transcripts to the list of legal clients he represented when he was practicing law?

These aren’t rumors, these are facts. Did it really take an independent documentary by an academic scholar to reveal this to the general public?

If the media is going to question Romney’s past, political views and “lack of transparency” in the national spotlight, I feel it is only fair that they do the same for Obama. But nothing short of a miracle would ever make that happen.

Polling

The liberal mainstream media and blogosphere are desperately trying to write Romney’s funeral using polls that oversample Democrats by as much a D+10, D+11 and D+13. In 2008, an historic election wave for Democrats, the electorate was D+7. In 2004, when George W. Bush won re-election, the electorate was evenly split. In other words, D+0. So was the 2010 midterm election: evenly split. The Democrat share of the electorate is not going to double this year. Given the well-noted enthusiasm edge for Republicans this year, the electorate is going to be far closer to the 2004 and 2010 models than 2008. Any poll trying to replicate the 2008 is going to artificially inflate Obama’s support.

But as pollster John McLaughlin explains, “The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR (Interactive Voice Response) polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want. Some polls have included sizable segments of voters who say they are ‘not enthusiastic’ to vote or non voters to dilute Republicans. Major pollsters have samples with Republican affiliation in the 20 to 30% range, at such low levels not seen since the 1960s in states like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and which then place Obama ahead. The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. We’ll see a lot more of this.”

A certain pundit on this site (guess who?) provided a link to some web site claiming that a national average of 2012 election polls (without citing which ones specifically) shows Obama leading Romney in several key states when excluding Rasmussen polls, implying Rasmussen has a Republican bias. What they fail to mention is that a Fordham University study concluded that Rasmussen had been the most accurate pollster throughout the 2008 election (and that was Obama’s good year).

I could just as easily provide a link to another website that claims to unskew the polls’ oversampling of Democrats to show that Romney actually leads Obama (and they even list which specific ones). But whether you look at Rasmussen, which has been accused of leaning right, Gallup, which has been accused of leaning left, both are showing the same thing: this race is virtually tied.

Absence of Investigative Journalism

Perhaps the biggest evidence of all proving the mainstream media’s liberal bias is the fact that it has thus far failed to push any further into this administration’s scandals such as Fast and Furious or the Benghazi attack.

Back in college, I remember reading Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men in journalism class, chronicling The Washington Post’s journalistic efforts to uncover the Nixon administration’s scandal regarding the Watergate break-in. It was a scandal in which President Nixon and his cabinet were exercising “executive privilege” to prevent the release of internal documents as well as trying to pin the blame on lower level subordinates to feebly deflect criticism and responsibility of the break-in.

Déjà vu 2012, where President Obama stopped the federal investigation into Operation Fast and Furious dead in its tracks by exercising “executive privilege” to prevent Attorney General Eric Holder from having to hand over internal Justice Department documents on the federal firearms sting operation that allowed weapons to reach Mexican drug cartels. Fourteen lower level subordinates at the Justice Department and ATF then get pinned for the blame and that’s where the administration is hoping it ends. Will there be any further reporting from the mainstream media on this? Or is Obama’s rendition of Al Green more important?

Or what about the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya? Within a week’s time, we witnessed this administration claim that it was a spontaneous protest against an anti-Islamic American film that got out of hand and caught them off guard to a reluctant admission that this was a pre-planned, coordinated attack with possible assistance from al-Qaeda of which they were warned about.

Watergate was a campaign stunt. These are scandals where U.S. border patrol agent Brian Terry, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and others have died. But where are today’s Woodwards and Bernsteins?

Is it then any wonder that a new Gallup poll shows American distrust in the mainstream media is now at an all-time high?

You’ll probably be even less shocked then to find that a majority of Democrats (58%) trust the mainstream media “to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly,” while only 31% of independents and 26% of Republicans trust the mainstream media to do the same.

Romney clearly has his work cut out for him. Too bad he doesn’t send a thrill up their leg the way Obama does.