Demoralized as Hell, the Final Gasp Pew Poll (Update and CNN is FUNNIER!)

The folks at PEW have released their last poll of the year and their head­line seems to be good news for Pres­i­dent Obama and bad news for me who has pre­dicted his defeat:

Barack Obama has edged ahead of Mitt Rom­ney in the final days of the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. In the Pew Research Center’s elec­tion week­end sur­vey, Obama holds a 48% to 45% lead over Rom­ney among likely voters.

Here is the line from the Poll

Left­ist sites are rejoic­ing at a 3 pt lead with seem­ingly no time for Rom­ney to change it, I’m sure Nate Sil­ver is already boost­ing his averages.

Alas for the left, PEW also released their inter­nals and even worse for them I haven’t for­got­ten how to do basic math so lets look at this last attempt to pre­tend some­thing is true that isn’t.

First the splits in Party (click to enlarge) :

Pew inter­viewed 2709 peo­ple, 2611 iden­ti­fied them­selves as either Repub­li­cans Democ­rats or Inde­pen­dents by their own count 843 Repub­li­cans, 1007 democ­rats and 761 inde­pen­dents. That works out to the following:

Democ­rats ¹⁰⁰⁷⁄₂₇₀₉ = 37.1%
Repub­li­cans ⁸⁴³⁄₂₇₀₉ = 31.1%
Inde­pen­dents ⁷⁶¹⁄₂₇₀₉ = 28.8%

So right off the bat we have a poll with a base advan­tage for Democ­rats of 6 pts. Even though both Gallup and Ras­mussen have told us that the elec­torate is major­ity GOP this time around.

That would be enough to laugh this poll off but the math­e­mat­i­cal leg­erde­main doesn’t end there.

All year we were told that this elec­tion was going to be who by he who took the inde­pen­dent vot­ers. If you look at this new Pew poll who is lead­ing among inde­pen­dents? Why lo and behold it is.…Mitt Rom­ney by 44% to 41% The GOP goes for Rom­ney 91 – 7 & dems for Obama 94 – 5

But that doesn’t mat­ter, appar­ently at this late date the inde­pen­dent vote that was so impor­tant just a few months ago doesn’t mat­ter in elec­tion 2012 anymore.

That’s strike two but you need three strikes for an out, is there a third one? Guess what, there is!

If we look at the sam­ple in terms of Gen­der did you know that the elec­torate in 2012 women are going to out­vote men? As there are more women than men that’s not so odd, until you look at the mar­gin… (click to enlarge)

Pew polled 1538 women vs 1171 men. That works out to the fol­low­ing percentages:

Women ¹⁵³⁸⁄₂₇₀₉ = 56.8
Men ¹¹⁷¹⁄₂₇₀₉ = 43.2

No won­der the women’s vote is so impor­tant! Accord­ing to PEW appar­ently women aren’t going to just out­vote men in 2012. They are going to do so in this elec­tion by 13 whole points! That is pretty inter­est­ing, par­tic­u­larly if you look at this chart from a pew study from just 4 years ago

In 2008 Pew reports a 4.2 point turnout advan­tage over men. Per­ish the thought, appar­ently accord­ing to THIS poll the 2012 gap is going to make that 2008 fig­ure look pos­i­tively miniscule…

…if you buy it that is.

OK that’s three strikes, but lets add a throw to first just in case this gets by the Catcher.

Let’s take a closer look at this sam­ple, how rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the elec­torate is it? Well one way to find out is to see how this group voted last time around (click to enlarge):

Well look at that a 13 point advan­tage of Obama vot­ers vs McCain vot­ers, but again this is reg­is­tered vot­ers, so lets remove those who didn’t vote so we can get down to those likely guys, what would the num­bers be?

Obama vot­ers ⁴⁶⁄₈₆ vot­ers = 53.4%

Ok that seems to mean these vot­ers Pres­i­dent Obama took 52.9% of the vote so that’s a full half a point MORE than the president’s share of the vote in 2008

McCain vot­ers ³³⁄₈₆ vot­ers = 38.3%

Hmmmm John McCain drew 45.7% of the vote so this fig­ure is a full 7.4 points BELOW John McCain’s vote total from 2008

That a 15.1 point gap in the pop­u­lar vote that Barack Obama won by 7.2 points, MORE THAN DOU­BLE the actual 2008 num­ber. That’s a throw to first to end the inning and the game.

So this is what the Pew poll would have you believe:

#1 We are going to have a D+6 elec­torate even though all signs indi­cate the Democ­rats are not all that thrilled with pres­i­dent Obama but in 2010 the repub­li­cans man­aged his­toric wins in the states, and the house and big sen­ate wins too.

#2 Even though inde­pen­dents favor Mitt Rom­ney by 3 points in this poll and Repub­li­cans are vot­ing 91 – 7 for Mitt accord­ing to their own num­ber the elec­torate in 2012 is SO demo­c­ra­tic that Obama is still up by 3 points

#3 The female elec­torate on elec­tion day is going to out­num­ber the male elec­torate by a full 13 points thus negat­ing any advan­tage that Mitt Rom­ney might have with men.

#4 A sam­ple where the peo­ple inter­viewed sup­ported Obama in 2008 by a fig­ure dou­ble than the actual result should be trusted to show us how the elec­torate will vote in 2012.

There is a phrase to describe this kind of think­ing, it’s known as “Will­ing sus­pen­sion of disbelief”.

While that is dandy if you are a Doc­tor Who fan watch­ing the Doc­tor reverse the polar­ity of the neu­tron flow, it doesn’t do a whole lot of good if you are try­ing to fig­ure out how an elec­tion is going to end up in the real world.

The fact that PEW and the left is flog­ging a D+6 poll with a +13 point sam­ple of women is funny, that this poll shows Rom­ney lead­ing among inde­pen­dents yet has Obama up 3 is fun­nier, that you are releas­ing a poll two days before an elec­tion that has a sam­ple whose mem­bers sup­ported Obama at dou­ble the rate of 2008 isn’t just funny it screams one thing:

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

This is the type of thing you do when you’ve got noth­ing else, they’ve got NOTH­ING and we are going to beat them so bad they are going to won­der why they were so will­ing to sell their cred­i­bil­ity on a can­di­date as bad as this president.

Update: If you think this is trou­ble for the left con­sider the new CNN poll. As Bre­it­bart reports:

More­over, the polls’s crosstabs indi­cate that Rom­ney is win­ning self-​described inde­pen­dent vot­ers by a giant 59%-37% mar­gin. A 22-​point lead among inde­pen­dents vir­tu­ally guar­an­tees vic­tory for Rom­ney. Yet Democ­rats are so heav­ily over-​represented in the CNN poll that Romney’s 22-​point lead becomes a mere 49%-49% tie.

Here is the sam­ple:

A total of 1,010 adults were inter­viewed by tele­phone nation­wide by live inter­view­ers call­ing both land­line and cell phones. All respon­dents were asked ques­tions con­cern­ing basic demo­graph­ics, and the entire sam­ple was weighted to reflect national Cen­sus fig­ures for gen­der, race, age, edu­ca­tion, region of coun­try, tele­phone usage and whether respon­dents own or rent their homes. Reg­is­tered vot­ers were asked ques­tions about their like­li­hood of vot­ing, past vot­ing behav­ior, and inter­est in the cam­paign; based on answers to those ques­tions, 693 respon­dents were clas­si­fied as likely vot­ers. Respon­dents who reported that they had already cast an absen­tee bal­lot or voted early were auto­mat­i­cally clas­si­fied as likely vot­ers. Among those likely vot­ers, 41% described them­selves as Democ­rats, 29% described them­selves as Inde­pen­dents, and 30% described them­selves as Repub­li­cans.

Media Cred­i­bil­ity day not with­stand­ing, if you are going to skew a poll with a D+11 sam­ple to get a tie you might as well get a D+12 sam­ple and give Obama a lead. If you are going to make a fool of your­self, why not?
It has Mitt & Obama Tied at 49, but only man­ages this feat with a +d11 sample