Why Pollsters Suck

One of the prevalent themes at the Faith & Freedom Coalition convention here in Washington, D.C., is how often pollsters, especially with exit polls, are so wrong.

Take Wisconsin, where the June 5 exit polls said Gov. Scott Walker and his liberal opponent, Tom Barrett, were dead even during their bitterly contested recall election. Yet, when the counting was done, Walker humiliated Barrett in a 7-percentage point landslide.

Why the result in Wisconsin? Why do pollsters claim gay marriage is 50-50 among Americans, yet same-sex measures have lost more than 30 consecutive elections when voters go to cast ballots?

As coalition leader Ralph Reed explained, pollsters repeatedly fail to detect conservative and Republican get-out-the-vote efforts. Instead, pollsters rely on election models rigidly dividing voters among demographic groups. He explained that blacks are 13 percent of the US population, so pollsters demand that 13 percent of poll respondents are black.

The reason why Wisconsin went so well for conservatives is his group was among many Republican-leaning groups which made phone calls and knocked on doors in the Badger State. Conservatives pulverized Democrats in what politicos call “the ground game,” or the “blocking and tackling” of grassroots activism.

Also taking to the polls at the convention were several other nationally known pollsters, including Dick Morris and Scott Rasmussen.

Morris said the most accurate polls, the ones with likely voters, give Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney a 2-point lead. Among registered voters, a less reliable predictor, Romney is even. Among adults, the least accurate method often used by left-leaning polling organizations, President Barack Obama has a 2-point lead.

“We’re going to win and win by a lot,” Morris told several thousand conservatives in attendance.

Morris predicts Romney will win big in November with a 6-to-10 point win – in other words, a total landslide.

Overall, the conservative activists here at the convention -- many of them tea party members like me -- are ready to fling themselves on razor wire to help Romney win and get Obama out of the White House. This is encouraging considering how conservatives were caught sleeping in 2008.

My political inner-child is telling me that Obama will get slaughtered in November. The schadenfreude for me is liberals are so high on their Kool-Aide anymore that they can’t sense they’re walking into the political shredder on Nov. 6.