NBC News ‘unskews’ its own poll in response to right-wing criticism.

From TPM...

NBC News, anticipating backlash over polls released Saturday that showed President Obama ahead in two crucial swing states, attempted to head off conservative criticism that the surveys sampled too many Democrats by preemptively “unskewing” its own numbers.

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So as part of a story online about the polls on Saturday, NBC News senior political editor Mark Murray included a section essentially imagining if the findings of his organization’s own poll were altered in a way that showed the Democratic sample in Ohio cut in half. In that case, Murray wrote, Obama’s lead would shrink to three points.

“We anticipated that there would be criticism of a D+9 sample, and asked our pollsters to assume — as an exercise — what the race would be simply if you halved that Democratic Party ID advantage,” Murray wrote. “We decided to publish that information in my story (towards the end, mind you). But make no mistake: The numbers are the numbers, and we stand by them.”

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“Well, what you do, you don’t pick the number,” Miringoff said at the time. “It’s based on the interviews with the people you do. So it’s not like you’re punching in a 10 point party spread. It’s based on the interviews and who remains in the pool. You don’t want a three credit lesson right now in survey research, I’m sure.”

more: http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/nbc-news-polls-sample-unskewed.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

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Republicans sure have a hard time with anything that involves science and research.