In a campaign season which is on track to go down as the worst ever for cooked polling, one from CBS News and the New York Times has outdone everyone to this point.
Clearly, they didn't like what a properly weighted result would have told them, which is that Mitt Romney is in a deadlock with Barack Obama if one uses Gallup's party affiliation numbers from before Democratic National Convention, or that he's up by five points if one opts for Rasmussen's affiliation numbers. In their latest poll, with registered voters, CBS/NYT not only oversampled Democrats, but they took the number of actual responses and further weighted them towards Dems, as seen after the jump.
Here is the CBS/NYT weighting exercise (found at the very end of the poll in the Scribd document; HT Mike Flynn at Breitbart):
So an 8-point margin among people they actually spoke with wasn't enough. So they weighted it further. There is no support for this action.
Taking the the three key results before weighting from the poll -- namely the Dem margin for Obama, the GOP margin for Romney, and Romney's margin among independents (these margins are among likely and not registered voters, but the margins among RVs were as far as I could tell not disclosed) -- one can see the results I teased earlier based on Rasmussen's party affiliation findings in August and Gallup's from before the Democratic National Convention:
The CBS/NYT poll says that Obama is ahead by eight points with registered voters and by three points among likely voters. Sure, guys. You're not fooling us.
Flynn's wrap: "The polls confirm that the media aren't really biased. Rather, they are active players for the other team." Dishonestly active.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
