Demoralized as Hell, Morning Joe & the Last Gasp Poll before Realville

I haven’t dived deeply into polls much lately because frankly there has been no point, Mitt Rom­ney has this race and bar­ing the “Live Boy Dead girl” sce­nario it’s not chang­ing. (actu­ally con­sid­er­ing Romany’s rep it wouldn’t take a dead girl, a live girl would shat­ter his clean image completely)

But with one week to go the last gasp effort to rally the MSNBC troops took place today on Morn­ing Joe as they touted the Quinnipiac/CBS?NYT polls Say­ing Obama is up 5 in Ohio with a week to go.

What really got me was their claim that the Quin­nip­iac poll was the “most accu­rate” and again play­ing the “poll denier” card. I’ve per­son­ally found their num­bers the least believ­able and while they were talk­ing about the fights in other states as an alter­na­tive to Ohio for Rom­ney I looked up the inter­nals of this Ohio/​VA/​Florida poll and found this:

After talk­ing about how reli­able Quin­nip­iac is, for 15 min­utes and while I was tweet­ing out the D+8 sam­ples in all of these states D+7 in Florida, they sud­denly piv­oted as Mark Halperin brought up the D+8 sam­ple and peo­ple asked how can this be the case if Mitt is up by huge mar­gins among inde­pen­dents in this poll?

At this time they made the case that the split in the sam­ple defines the elec­torate while I argue that the accu­rate of the poll is based on how the splits match the electorate.

Now Polls have lim­i­ta­tion based on the response rate and the var­i­ous meth­ods of get­ting peo­ple to answer but the actual reg­is­tra­tion and demo­graph­ics of a state are a real­ity, they may change over time but they are what they are no mat­ter what but of a sam­ple is used.

In the 7 AM Hour more of the same and in the 8 AM hour they repeated this non­sense. This isn’t a poll, this is a last gasp before Media Cred­i­bil­ity day arrives and it becomes impos­si­ble to deny what already exists.

That the Morn­ing Joe team is spend­ing a show try­ing to sell the accu­racy of a D+8 poll in Ohio & VA & +7 in Fla to their far left base speaks vol­umes, here is what it says to me:

“Ride right through them, they’re demor­al­ized as hell”!

When you are reduced to Chuck Todd argu­ing body lan­guage in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions that’s pretty bad, by con­trast you have Rom­ney peo­ple can­vas­ing dur­ing the damn storm.

Folks, there is going to be a turnout effort in Ohio like you’ve never seen. George Cullen has been can­vass­ing door-​to-​door for the past five weeks. He usu­ally hits about 50 doors a day, but only got 25 under the storm con­di­tions yes­ter­day. He’s a West Point grad­u­ate who served six years in the Army, and he says, “The con­ser­v­a­tives are very energized.”

Yeah this is a D+8 state SURE! It will be fun to watch these guys next Wednesday.

Update: Just called Robert Stacy McCain on the ground in Ohio and asked about the “Body Lan­guage” stuff from Chuck Todd: “It’s crazy” He spoke to Kevin Mad­den on Sun­day one of the top guys in the Rom­ney Cam­paign after rally. He seemed calm and laid back. He hasn’t seen any of this scary “Body Lan­guage” from the Rom­ney folks.

They are still work­ing hard, they have not slacked off nor would any­one expect them to but if our friends on the left want to tell them­selves this, as the folks in the south say “Bless their Hearts”.

Update 2: Ed Mor­ris­sey elab­o­rates:

In each of these three states, the CBS/​NYT/​Q-​poll shows Repub­li­cans at a lower per­cent­age level of turnout than in the 2008 elec­tion. If one makes that assump­tion, it’s not too dif­fi­cult to be guess that Obama might be ahead. How­ever, that’s exactly the oppo­site of what all other polls rat­ing enthu­si­asm are telling us what the elec­torate will look like on Tues­day. In fact, it’s not even what this poll shows, with Repub­li­can enthu­si­asm +16 over Democ­rats in Florida, +14 in Ohio, and +7 in Virginia.

I guess that explains why we didn’t see Ed on the show today. I sus­pect that mes­sage wouldn’t have been all that welcome.

Update 3: Insta­lanche and Michael Gra­ham who you might recall was the owner of the site “Any­body But Mitt” says what is coming:

I believe we’re on the verge of a solid Rom­ney win for two rea­sons. One is the objec­tive evi­dence. The other is the ugly des­per­a­tion of the Obama cam­paign in its final days.

and he raises a very impor­tant point I never thought of:

The pres­i­dent, on the other hand, has peaked at 47 per­cent. The Bat­tle­ground Poll model shows Obama los­ing 52 per­cent to 47 per­cent. Ras­mussen daily track­ing has Obama los­ing 49 per­cent to 47 per­cent. Pew has him tied: 47 per­cent to 47 per­cent. But more impor­tant, all the polls show Obama slid­ing or stuck. None show any upward movement.

Obama sup­port­ers are quick to tell you “the only poll that mat­ters is the one on Elec­tion Day.” Two things: a) that’s what can­di­dates who are behind always say; b) this is elec­tion day.

Next Wednes­day is going to be fun.

Update 4: Stacy who I so rudely woke up in the first update asks an obvi­ous ques­tion:

You might think some reporter at the New York Times, which co-​sponsored this poll, would think it worth his while to inter­view the peo­ple at Quin­nip­iac and ask where they’re get­ting these weird over-​samples of Democ­rats. What is caus­ing this? How is it that Repub­li­cans report greater vot­ing enthu­si­asm by such large mar­gins, and yet are under­rep­re­sented in the poll’s sam­ple? It makes no sense.

I’d love to hear the answer.

BTW PPP poll now being touted, Iowa Sam­ple is D+5 Wis­con­sin D+4