Mitt Romney is clearly winning, if you ignore the polls (Susan J. Demas column)

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on September 27, 2012 at 8:00 AM, updated September 27, 2012 at 8:01 AM

A few weeks ago, I wrote that Mitt Romney was losing Michigan. I was wrong.

You see, I made the mistake of looking at polls.

mitt-romney-milwaukee-040312.jpg Mitt Romney/ AP Photo
It's true that since then, the polls have gotten even worse for Romney in Michigan and across the country. The last three surveys taken in Michigan all show President Obama sporting healthy, double-digit leads -- the Glengariff Group/Detroit News has him leading by 14, Rasmussen Reports has it at 12 and EPIC-MRA/Detroit Free Press has the President with a 10-point lead.

But I've since learned that polls, much like reality, have a liberal bias. 

Since polls show Romney down, what other explanation can there be?

Look, Obama should be blowing this thing. The economy is still dicey, unemployment is bouncing back up and Libya is burning. So you just know that Romney is winning in your heart, your gut.

And if the polls show otherwise, well, they're just following orders from the Big Liberal Media Conspiracy (TM) to re-elect President Obama. (By the way, just got my kit in the mail and the new Obama flag that will replace the stars and stripes is awesome).

As John Nolte writes for Andrew Breitbart's Big Media blog, the media is just using polls "to beat Romney senseless and to depress Republican enthusiasm." And several conservative pundits have jumped on the bandwagon, with Rush Limbaugh, et al. writing a letter to network news heads whining about media bias (Dangit, they're onto us. Quick, to the Conspiracy Headquarters in Kenya). 

That's why I was heartened to discover, the land where Romney magically wins every poll if enough Republicans are dumped into the sample. Everyone from Texas Gov. Rick Perry to former GOP National Committeeman Saul Anuzis have given it their stamp of approval.

The site relies on the highly unlikely scenario that even Fox News and Republican outfits like Rasmussen are part of the Obama Conspiracy and are maniacally pumping up his numbers by including too many Democrats. 

UnskewedPolls is to polling what creation science is to science. 

The fact is, more people identify as Democrats than Republicans in every polling firms' partisan breakdown, except Rasmussen. That's just an inconvenient detail for UnSkewedPolls, which haphazardly adds more Republicans into the sample in its barely discernable methodology.

Of course, many surveys, like Quinnipiac, don't even weight for party identification, because it's changeable. But no matter. UnSkewed Polls knows that the GOP will show up in record numbers this year and has adjusted the polls accordingly.

Now life is hard. Sometimes you gotta believe in something. I personally light a candle every night for Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt to get back together.

Other people might need to be assuaged by a laughably inaccurate polling site. That's cool.

It's also not the first time Republicans have done this. When polling showed Democrats would take back the House in 2006, Karl Rove sniffed that surveys have their math, but he has "THE math." And that turned out really well.

But with a flagging campaign, Romney political director Rich Beeson has little choice but to feed into the polling conspiracy trope, so donors and grassroots activists don't get too spooked.  

"The public polls are what the public polls are. I kinda hope the Obama campaign is basing their campaign on what the public polls say," he told reporters. "We don't. We have confidence in our data and our metrics."

All I can say is that the Romney campaign in Michigan doesn't really believe it. They're still not spending money here, although the campaign celebrated when a SuperPAC -- with which it can't coordinate -- started running ads again after a hiatus.

As for polls, the Romney Michigan campaign sent this email out a couple weeks ago and I haven't changed the headline: "Fox Detroit: Obama leads Romney in latest poll for Fox 2." That's right. They're celebrating being down in a poll, because at least in the Foster McCollum White Baydoun survey, Romney was within the margin of error.

So perhaps I can help.

I have since opened up my own polling firm and surveyed three Republican members of my family. Romney is killing it, 100-0. If Real Clear Politics and the mainstream media don't report on my poll, I, too, will pen a screed about their involvement in the Obama Conspiracy.

You heard it here first, folks.
