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“You freaking NAILED the projection.”

3 outfits muddied the waters for all of us. Rasmussen, Gallup and RealClearPolitics. I will never trust any of those three again.

Rasmussen fundamentally does not understand party ID and spread his ignorance all over FR and in the conservative blogs, FoxNews, Rush, Drudge, everywhere...it was like poison.

You sample 1000 people and 38% say they are Democrats and 32% say they are Republicans...you leave it at that! Party ID FOLLOW the vote, not the other way around. Rasmussen weighted and fudged the data to fit the way he saw the world. No one person sees the world as it objectively is, Philosophy 101.

RealClearPolitics threw out any polls they saw as from “biased” sources without looking at their methodologies. DailyKos (Obama +2) had incredibly good methodology and will go down as the best or nearly the best poll of Nov. 2012. But the people running RealClearPolitics are conservative, and I love that about them, but you don’t bring your ideology into the scientific realm....period.

They did the same thing to PPP. Liberal outfit, throw them out, they aren’t going in our RCP average. PPP ended up the same as DailyKos, dead on at Obama +2.

Lastly, Gallup. Gallup has been a joke for almost a decade now. In 2010 they’re final poll was so embarrassing I don’t know how or why ANYONE would ever post their results. They called the generic +15 Republicans and were dead last, off by over 8 points. They are possibly the worst polling outfit so far in the 21st century.

So you take the fact that RCP throws out polls that are from liberal sources without any scientific justification. Ignore RCP during the election but start paying attention to their average toward the end when they start allowing more polls into the average.

Throw out Rasmussen completely because A) he uses automated phone calls B) he only calls landlines and C) he tinkers with party ID.

Lastly throw out Gallup because they were such an insane outlier that no one with common sense would have considered their polls. If you have 12 polls saying the race is tied +/- 2 and Gallup, one single poll, is saying Romney is up +5. That’s a no brainer.

Of course I did some historical research and look at the census data for 2010 to get my projection as well. The census data was amazing. It told me that the 2008 youth and hispanic votes were not a fluke. The millenials, the youth now, are a larger population than the baby boomers...I didn’t know that until I looked at the census. The hispanic vote is growing at insane rates and the black vote is solid 13% and their turnout is pretty much the same.

Add all that up, it wasn’t tough to project what I did. I will tell you what was tough, POSTING IT HERE! I got by teeth kicked in by a lot of people.

I have to mention one more thing. My utter disdain for Matt Drudge and his political quackery. He lead us all on and his cherry picking polls and giving false hope bled into the campaigns and the volunteers minds. It could have negatively affected the get out the vote efforts.

Drudge could have chosen from any of 18 polls to put on his website. There were 18 solid firms to choose from and here is how they did when compared to the final results. I have listed them in order from most accurate to least accurate:

Ipsos/Reuters - Obama +2
PPP - Obama +2
DailyKos - Obama +2
YouGov - Obama +2
Pew - Obama +3
ABC/Wash Post - Obama +3
Angus-Reid - Obama +3
ABC/Post - Obama +3
UPI/CVOTER - Obama +1
IBD/TIPP - Obama +1
Gravis Marketing - tie
JZ Analytics/Newsmax - tie
Politico/GWU/Battleground - tie
Monmouth - tie
ARG - tie
CNN - tie
Rasmussen - Romney +1
Gallup - Romney +2

Guess which two polls Drudge put on his website nearly every damn day for the last week. You guessed, the bottom 2. He chose the two most inaccurate pollsters, the obvious outliers to anyone that has had even intro to statistics, on to his page. That really pissed me off because of the meme that it created that everything would be fine and no more phone calls or door knocking were necessary.