I made the mistake of having the TV on to msnbc this morning. Morning Joke has been watching Obama kick their asses so long that when they get a little good news, they go full delusional. Ignoring all other polls, Morning Joke this morning played up the Pew Poll, declared Romney to be winning, and spiked the football over the end of the gender gap. You see, according to Morning Joke, women want the same thing as men: Mitt Romney, and not the "weak" Barack Obama. Yep, Mitt is the "manly" candidate.
We know Pew is an outlier. Yes, Romney has made a race out of it with his debate performance and Obama's medicore performance. But most polls show President Obama still winning and no other poll shows an end to the ender gap.
Blowing smoke up their own asses is what Morning Joke is doing. Their desperation makes me much calmer. Pew won't last. It will be displaced by all the other polls coming out showing it to be an outlier.
I think Nate Silver has it right:
There are two smarter questions to ask about the Pew poll. First, is it really likely that Mr. Romney leads the race by 4 points right now? The consensus of the evidence, particularly the national tracking polls, would suggest otherwise. Instead, the forecast model’s conclusion is that the whole of the data is still consistent with a very narrow lead for Mr. Obama, albeit one that is considerably diminished since Denver.
It might be granted that the situation is more ambiguous than usual right now. But our forecast model looks at literally all of the polls; it estimates Mr. Romney’s post-debate bounce as being 2.5 percentage points, not quite enough to erase Mr. Obama’s pre-debate advantage.
The other valid line of inquiry concerns the timing of the poll. The Pew poll was conducted from Thursday through Sunday, although more of the interviews were conducted in the earlier part of that period. There’s nothing in the poll that really refutes the story that Mr. Romney initially received a very large bounce after the debate (perhaps somewhere on the order of 4 or 5 points, if not quite as large as Pew shows it), which has since faded some between the news cycle turning over and the favorable jobs report on Friday.
The evidence that Mr. Romney’s bounce is receding some is only modestly strong — as opposed to the evidence that he got a significant bounce in the first place, which is very strong. Still, the order in which polls are published does not exactly match the order in which they were actually conducted — and at turning points in the race, these details can make a difference.
The last thing to consider is that the fundamentals of the race aren’t consistent with a 4-point lead for Mr. Romney. Instead, the most recent economic numbers, and Mr. Obama’s approval ratings, would seem to point to an election in which he is the slight favorite. We don’t use approval ratings in our forecast, but we do use the economic data, and both the monthly payrolls report and the broader FiveThirtyEight economic index would point toward an election in which Mr. Obama is favored in the popular vote by around 2.5 percentage points.
NY Times, Nate Silver, 538 blog
Morning Joke fail, again.