How to assuage your fears if you are a Romney supporter

It’s simple– just pretend like Gallup is the only poll that exists and ignore the many other methodologically sophisticated polls that give Obama a solid lead.  Here’s Jay Cost today:

Conservatives are growing worried, and Democrats gleeful, about Obama’s lead in the polls, basically for the same reason: it is late in the season (or so it seems), and the incumbent president has a lead. That is a good thing for Obama.

Perhaps, but three fundamental points need to be kept in mind.

First, Obama is weaker than previous incumbents who went on to victory. When we are looking through history, the only poll we can really utilize is Gallup if we want an apples-to-apples comparison. For better or worse, Gallup is the only polling organization consistently doing polling of registered voters since 1952. Even media outlets that have been polling a long time have changed pollsters over the years, so Gallup is the only game in town when we are investigating history.

That’s some nice sophistry.  Apples-to-apples would be year-to-year polling averages.   So, anyway, if you simply choose to ignore the evidence from pretty much every other poll, Romney’s got nothing to worry about.  That’s a pretty big “if.”

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