I worked the last four weeks of the 2012 election as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in Ohio. It was a wonderful, rewarding experience that was also often challenging and exhausting. But whenever I’d start to get at all burnt out, all I had to do was look at Dean Chambers “Unskewed Polls” and I’d always have a good laugh and feel cheered and energized again.
See, Dean could just tell that the only possible explanation for poll after poll showing Barack Obama with a large and constant lead in the Electoral College was because they were all skewed by a Liberal media. Because how could anyone possibly not see that Barack Obama was the worst President the US had ever had? How could anyone outside of Illinois and the crazy coasts (and even then...) possibly vote for such a transparently weak, thuggish, Socialist, Muslim, incompetent, treacherous, milquetoast, tyrannic, lawless, pedantic evil dictator / wimp?
Well, Dean Chambers has largely disappeared down the memory hole, after a few weeks of providing stats showing that while he was right, he had failed to adjust for the blatantly committed electoral fraud… But now Vox has a lead on the new unskewers — the right-wing horror site, Long Room, whose careful statistical re-analysis shows that without a doubt Donald Trump has a 1% lead on Hillary Clinton.
If you have the stomach, it’s actually worth seeing quite how insane their “unskewing” process is. Were you aware that every single polling outfit in America has a Liberal bias, except maybe kind of Quinnipiac? Did you know that Rasmussen has a Liberal bias of 2.3%? Because they really do.
Oh, and yes, they’ve totally got a methodology which has footnotes and words like “crosstabs” and “methodology” and everything. And if that wasn’t enough proof for you Doubting Thomases, their model totally and accurately retro-predicts the last 3 Presidential elections. So take that, haters!
And so the echo chamber echoes, this time with a candidate whose “concession” speech is likely to question the validity of the entire election process. And again, only three words can sum up this entire election cycle: The mind boggles.