Put This in Your Polling Pipe and Smoke It: Big Drops Since '08 in Voter Registration, Especially Among Dems

Rush Limbaugh brought up an important matter relating to polling Friday, which even beyond what is already known about party affiliation from Rasmussen and Gallup, further supports the notion that performing presidential preference polls based on 2008 presidential turnout is fundamentally flawed.

Read it below, because you can virtually bet what's left of the value of your home that you won't see this item mentioned anywhere in the establishment press, even though its ultimate source is a liberal group:

Drop in Ohio voter registration, especially in Dem strongholds, mirrors nationwide trend

... a precipitous decline in Democratic voter registration in key swing states -- nowhere more apparent than in Ohio.

Voter registration in the Buckeye State is down by 490,000 people from four years ago. Of that reduction, 44 percent is in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.

"I think what we're seeing is a lot of spin and hype on the part of the Obama campaign to try to make it appear that they're going to cruise to victory in Ohio," Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman Rob Frost said. "It's not just Cuyahoga County. Nearly 350,000 of those voters are the decrease in the rolls in the three largest counties, Cuyahoga, Hamilton and Franklin."

Frost points out that those three counties all contain urban centers, where the largest Democrat vote traditionally has been.

Ohio is not alone. An August study by the left-leaning think tank Third Way showed that the Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio. In Florida, Democratic registration is down 4.9 percent, in Iowa down 9.5 percent. And in New Hampshire, it's down down 19.7 percent.

Of course, voter registrations aren't the same as self-reported party affiliation, wherein many who haven't registered as Dems or Republicans nonetheless identify themselves as members of one or the other party. But it would make sense that at least some of the disproportionate Democratic fall-off, even after culling the dead and those who have moved away from the voter rolls, will end up being reflected at the ballot box.

It also supports the notion that there has been the kind of party affiliation shift Rasmussen has documented  (from Dems +7.6 in November 2008 to GOP +4.3 in August 2012), and the related notion that polls containing far more Democrats than Republicans do not representatively sample the way things are now, i.e., that they're seriously cooked.

Rasmussen's September 28 tracking poll has Obama up by one point nationally at 47-46%.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.