Living in their own reality

You know, those of us who read the political news on a regular basis have noticed that Obama seems to be holding a small but clear lead over Romney and, if anything, his position seems to be improving over the last couple of days rather than fading as the convention “bounce” wears off thanks to a few unforced errors by the Romney campaign. All of which seems pretty reasonable.

Of course, we’re not conspiracy minded extremists who think Obama is the next thing to an extremist socialist Muslim anti-colonialist Kenyan traitor-in-chief who should be losing handily to whatever anointed figurehead with a (R) after his name is running against him, positions on the issues be damned.

So what to do when reality refuses to conform to your delusions? Create your own reality! One in which all those polls showing Obama winning the battle for people’s votes are just part and parcel of that “liberal media bias” and therefore deliberately skewed in Obama’s favour.

I present UnSkewedPolls.com, the best new website on the political Internet. UnSkewed Polls finally removes the “liberal media bias” from every single national opinion poll, and it turns out that “unskewing” them means “making it so that Romney is ahead by a lot.” Rick Perry approves!

The UnSkewed Average has Romney at 51.8 percent and Obama at a mere 44 percent. How does the genius behind UnSkewed Polls go about unskewing all the polls — like, for real, the vast majority of polls — that show the opposite result? Well, Dean Chambers, the polling genius behind the site, simply “re-weights” every single national poll to reflect his belief that Republicans are undersampled, based on right-leaning pollster Rasmussen’s partisan breakdown of the electorate. (Scott Rasmussen blurbs: “you cannot compare partisan weighting from one polling firm to another.”)

And obviously “re-weighting” every single poll to reflect an electorate made up of a plurality of self-identified Republicans also involves a bit of guesswork! Like, for example, sometimes polls don’t include crosstabs, so Mr. Unskewed just assumes they’re skewed with liberal media bias, and corrects accordingly.

This is hardly a new phenomena, and the author even notes when some liberals were playing the wishful thinking game in 2004 in regards to John Kerry, but while I remember some rumblings in this area from pro-Republicans regarding McCain’s numbers in 2008, the rhetoric of the true believers this time around seems a great deal more focused than last time.

I suppose I should not be surprised by such things. After all, denial of reality and empirical evidence is part of the litmus test Republicans are forced to take these days on a number of issues, so what’s one more denial of evidence to add to the pile.

Still, assuming another Obama victory in November, I can’t imagine how much more unhinged the wingnuts buying into this “unskewed” alternate reality are going to become.