The lengths liberal media outlets will go to assist the politicians they support is oftentimes sick-making.
Consider the following paragraphs in the Washington Post's "Poll Finds Americans in an Anti-incumbent Mood as Midterm Elections Near":
Still, for President Obama and his party, there are some positive signs in the poll. The public trusts Democrats more than Republicans to handle the major problems facing the country by a double-digit margin, giving Democrats a bigger lead than they held two months ago, when Congress was engaged in the long endgame over divisive health-care legislation. A majority continues to see Obama as "just about right" ideologically, despite repeated GOP efforts to define the president as outside the mainstream.
Those polled also say they trust Obama over Republicans in Congress to deal with the economy, health care and, by a large margin, financial regulatory reform. And the president continues to get positive marks on his overall job performance, with, for the first time since the fall, a majority of independents approving.
As Hot Air's Ed Morrissey pointed out Tuesday, those involved with this poll cooked the books:
Why did Obama and the Democrats still manage to hold more trust over their GOP opponents? The pollster talked to more of them, that's how - and more of them than they did in the last poll, relative to Republicans. In the March 26th poll, the WaPo/ABC sample had a D/R/I split of 34/24/38, giving Democrats a partisan advantage of 10 points in the poll. This time, the sample's split went 34/23/38, and even the independents split in favor of the Democrats, 19/17, up from 17/17 last month. Just to give some perspective, the partisan gap from their November 2008 poll just before the election was nine points - and 26% of the sample was Republicans, compared to 23% now.Given the expanding partisan gap shown in this poll, small wonder that Obama winds up with more trust than Republicans among respondents. It's also no mystery why the WaPo/ABC poll shows Obama adding to his job approval rating, 54/44, when every other pollster has Obama sinking. That ten-point swing in the sample makes quite a difference.
You bet it does.
In fact, this large an oversampling of Democrats flies in the face of numerous polls in the past six months showing public support for the Donkeys plummeting.
With this in mind, if your D/R sample was 35/26 in November 2008 when Republicans were tremendously out of favor, this gap should narrow with the public's current negative view of Democrats.
Instead, as Morrissey pointed out, the folks responsible for this WaPo/ABC News poll EXPANDED this differential.
I wonder why.
