Wednesday, as it happened, provided absolutely zero salvation for Republicans who spent most of the early part of the week working feverishly to convince themselves that the bad polling they were seeing was simply some kind of large-scale conspiracy designed to trick people into thinking that Mitt Romney was losing, and dragging the bulk of the GOP down with him.
Indeed, all the poll "unskewers" and skeptics have left, predictably, is Rasmussen. And even Rasmussen, in all candor, has stopped making sense.
More on that after the jump. But, first, the numbers:
PRESIDENTIAL POLLING:
NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Obama 50, Romney 44
NATIONAL (Ipsos/Reuters Tracking): Obama 49, Romney 43 (LV); Obama 47, Romney 40 (RV)
NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Romney 48, Obama 46
NATIONAL (Selzer for Bloomberg): Obama 49, Romney 43
NATIONAL (YouGov): Obama 48, Romney 43
COLORADO (Gravis--R): Obama 50, Romney 46
FLORIDA (Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion Research): Obama 49, Romney 46
FLORIDA (Quinnipiac for CBS/NYT): Obama 52, Romney 43
IOWA (PPP): Obama 51, Romney 44
MARYLAND (Gonzales Research): Obama 55, Romney 36
MASSACHUSETTS (Rasmussen): Obama 55, Romney 40
MISSOURI (Chilenski Strategies for Missouri Scout): Romney 50, Obama 44
OHIO (Quinnipiac for CBS/NYT): Obama 53, Romney 43
PENNSYLVANIA (Franklin and Marshall): Obama 52, Romney 43 (LV); Obama 50, Romney 39 (RV)
PENNSYLVANIA (Quinnipiac for CBS/NYT): Obama 54, Romney 42
DOWNBALLOT POLLING:
AZ-SEN (Anzalone-Liszt for the Carmona campaign): Jeff Flake (R) 44, Richard Carmona (D) 43, Marc Victor (L) 3
AZ-SEN (Rasmussen): Jeff Flake (R) 47, Richard Carmona (D) 41
CT-SEN (PPP): Chris Murphy (D) 48, Linda McMahon (R) 42
FL-SEN (Quinnipiac for CBS/NYT): Sen. Bill Nelson (D) 53, Connie Mack IV (R) 39
FL-SEN (Unidentified internal poll for the Mack campaign): Sen. Bill Nelson (D) 48, Connie Mack IV (R) 42
MD-SEN (Gonzales Research): Sen. Ben Cardin (D) 50, Daniel Bongino (R) 22, Rob Sobhani (I) 21
MO-SEN (Chilenski Strategies for Missouri Scout): Todd Akin (R) 48, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) 47
OH-SEN (Quinnipiac for CBS/NYT): Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) 50, Josh Mandel (R) 40
PA-SEN (Franklin and Marshall): Sen. Bob Casey (D) 48, Tom Smith (R) 38
PA-SEN (Quinnipiac for CBS/NYT): Sen. Bob Casey (D) 49, Tom Smith (R) 43
MO-GOV (Chilenski Strategies for Missouri Scout): Gov. Jay Nixon (D) 55, Dave Spence (R) 38
NH-GOV (Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for the NH Democratic Party): Maggie Hassan (D) 48, Ovide Lamontagne (R) 46
NY-24 (Grove Insight for the DCCC): Dan Maffei (D) 46, Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R) 38, Ursula Rozum (G) 7
PA-12 (Anzalone-Liszt for the Critz campaign): Mark Critz (D) 52, Keith Rothfus (R) 41
PA-12 (McLaughlin and Associates for the Rothfus campaign): Rep. Mark Critz (D) 38, Keith Rothfus (R) 38
UT-04 (Public Opinion Strategies for the Love campaign): Mia Love (R) 51, Rep. Jim Matheson (D) 36
A few thoughts, as always, await you just past the jump...
With Gallup having stretched out from a tie a week ago to a six-point lead for Barack Obama in today's edition of the tracking poll, it has finally come down to this: the GOP is all in with Rasmussen.
The House of Ras, as they often are, find themselves all alone on a curiously red-tinted island. This time, what is intriguing is not only are their topline numbers in direct contrast to the rest of the polling universe, but so, too, is the trajectory. While just about everyone else has either held steady or seen movement in the direction of the president, the House is alone in seeing an incremental movement in the direction of Mitt Romney.
The problem, however, is that it is getting increasingly hard to reconcile Rasmussen's lofty national numbers for the Romney campaign with state polling numbers. Hell, it is getting increasingly hard to reconcile Rasmussen's lofty national numbers for the Romney campaign with their own state polling numbers.
In the past week alone, the House of Ras has released data showing Barack Obama with twelve point leads over Mitt Romney in both Michigan and Pennsylvania. Earlier in the month, they give Obama leads (albeit very modest ones) in Ohio and Florida.
In the name of full disclosure, Rasmussen did have Romney heavily overperforming in some smaller venues (specifically, Iowa and New Hampshire, although they've been badly contradicted in the former).
By and large, though, Rasmussen's state polls have not been dramatically more Republican than the polling universe at large, given the time in which they were in the field. Yet their national numbers, at least this week, have been markedly different.
The problem with that is, in a word that Bill Clinton reinvigorated in Charlotte: arithmetic. It simply does not follow logically that Romney could have a national lead if President Obama is up by a dozen points in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and ahead in Ohio and Florida. After all, those results are, at worst, a point or two behind Obama's 2008 pace, when he won nationally by 7.3 percent.
For those still tenaciously clinging to the thin thread that the House of Ras is providing for them, there is one simple question: if Romney is really ahead by two points, where is that margin he is building that has him up on John McCain by nine points on the margin?!
If you can't even effectively prove it with Rasmussen's own polling, you certainly won't be able to do it with the critical mass of (lib-biased, horrifically skewed) polling that is out there showing Obama beating his 2008 numbers in several key states, and close enough to those numbers in others.
In other polling news...
- There is one poll where the nation is trending blue in a way that defies any conventional wisdom. Alas, it is in the grossly unscientific 7-Eleven poll of coffee drinkers. For the uninitiated, customers are asked to pour their coffee into color-coded cups, which register as "a vote" for either Obama or Romney. At last check, Barack Obama holds leads in places like (tee-hee) Texas, Kansas, Arizona and...wait for it...Utah. Indeed, Mitt Romney can only cling to four states: Idaho, West Virginia, New Hampshire (?), and South Carolina. He also has 60 percent of the vote in Washington state, whose residents will no doubt protest. Not at Obama's lead, mind you, but the mere fact that anyone in a state with the multitude of coffee places offered by the good people of the Evergreen State would actually buy their friggin' coffee at 7-Eleven.
- My favorite poll of the day, however, is not Coffeepalooza sponsored by America's favorite quick-stop convenience store. No, my pick is a presidential poll for a local paper in Texas that offered...shall we say...interesting options.
- My pick for the whack-ass poll of the day has to come from Utah, but not for the reason you might think. Sure, I doubt the topline results there (where Republican Mia Love's campaign is claiming a 15-point edge over veteran Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson), but a Love lead of some size seems plausible, given the nominally hostile terrain only made worse by having the first LDS presidential nominee in U.S. history lining up for the GOP (and a semi-native son of Utah, to boot). But what makes this poll a laugher is the gloating rhetoric which accompanies it, pointing out that over the summer, POS polled the district and found Love down 13. Sorry, Love was hardly an unknown quantity (she became something of a media darling when she seized the nomination, and was one of the more high-profile GOP challengers from the get-go). Absent Matheson making an Akin-esque unforced error (and he hasn't), it just defies plausibility that the race has shifted 28 points in around two months.