No, the Polls Aren't Rigged to Look Like 2008

Campaign 2012 has reached the stage where partisans have moved from attacking their opponents to attacking the polls. And while there's been criticism from all sides, the current state of the polls explains why the most vociferous denunciations are coming from the right. One dismayed conservative has even set up a website, unskewedpolls.com, where poll results are re-calibrated in ways that supposedly strips them of their bias.

One common complaint in the current conservative fusillade is that many 2012 polls are using the “2008 turnout model.” Karl Rove, for instance, alleges that the pollsters are weighting their surveys to reflect the partisan and racial composition of the 2008 electorate–when Democrats outnumbered their Republican counterparts by 7 points on election day. Conservative critics think the GOP's enthusiasm to oust President Obama means that differential will be a lot smaller this year. That might be valid, but the implication that polls are rigged to reflect the 2008 electorate is outright misleading: most of this year's polls don’t use “the 2008 turnout model.”


http://www.tnr.com/blog/electionate/107778/the-polls-dont-use-2008-turnout-model