No doubt in an effort to influence campaign coverage and polling aggregators, it appears that Republican pollsters have just begun to flood the zone with their polls. According to the Talking Point Memo Poll Tracker app, three out of six of the national polls released yesterday had a conservative bent; that is from Rasmussen, Investor’s Business Daily, and Fox. So far today they are batting .500 with two of the four polls being from IBD and Rasmussen. And here’s a coincidence: both of those polls show the race to be within the margin of error! Can you imagine?
I believe the regression analysis done by most aggregators factor in both poll results and frequency, so this flooding technique can have a fairly strong influence on aggregated results. And when those in the conservative media cherry-pick these polls, it gives their their despairing followers hope and may help motivate them to get out the vote. But scaring some of us Democrats with their polls may make some of us work harder, so it’s not all bad.
Rasmussen has another little trick up their sleeve. As if their English-only landline robocalls didn’t give their sample population enough of a conservative twist, they have been including minor party candidates in ALL of their polls, which at this point is silly. But at this point even the four-way polling isn’t helping the Republicans much.
Incidentally, the Talking Points Memo Poll Tracker web page doesn’t make the release dates obvious, so I used their phone app to determine those dates. And the app is awesome by the way. You can specify which races you are interested in, and then get a notification every time a new poll for that election is released.