Romney pushes back at polls while pundits spar

Matt K. Lewis Senior Contributor
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The more things change, the more they stay the same. Mitt Romney’s campaign and supporters are pushing back this morning at polls which they believe were conducted using questionable methodology.

The latest example is a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that, “Obama leads Romney by 59 percent to 31 percent among early voters…”

In response, Romney campaign Political Director Richard Beeson issued a memo Monday morning, poking holes in the survey.

As Beeson notes, “only 5% of early voting has completed”  “this was a national poll conducted online with a margin of error around 10%” — and that “just 361 people account for the entire nation’s sample of early voters.” (emphasis his.)

This is not the first time polls have been disputed. But with Election Day approaching, tensions are clearly rising (as evidenced by an exchange between two well-known political pundits — the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and National Review’s Jim Geraghty — who had different, shall we say interpretations of the poll.)

But the Reuters/Ipsos survey isn’t the only poll being called into question.

Washington Post-ABC News poll is also spurring controversy because of what some believe is a skewed sample.

In the 17th paragraph, the Post finally concedes that in the survey, “Democrats outnumber Republicans by nine percentage points among likely voters…”

Nobody serious would argue that pollsters should anticipate evenly-matched turnout between the parties, but recent events and trends seem to indicate that this is, indeed, a gross example of oversampling…

Matt K. Lewis