Obama campaign spokeswoman: CBS/NYT(!) poll unfavorable to Obama is ‘biased’

posted at 12:44 pm on May 15, 2012 by Howard Portnoy

How can you tell when a poll is biased or uses flawed methodology? That’s easy. If the findings are unfavorable to the Obama administration or his chances for re-election, the poll can be written off as fantastical.

And we are not just talking FOX News surveys, which everyone knows are absurdly skewed. We’re talking a CBS/New York Times poll.

This was essentially the claim made by Obama campaign deputy manager Stephanie Cutter, who was interviewed by NBC’s Chuck Todd on MSNBC on Tuesday (h/t The Examiner). The subject was a newly released CBS/New York Times survey that asked whether the president’s recent “coming out” as a supporter of same-sex marriage was motivated by politics or by a sincere belief in the righteousness of these unions. Of the 615 adults queried, 67% saw the move as politically expedient, 24% as sincere.

Seeing is believing. In this clip from the program, Todd concedes that the methodology of the poll, which was a callback, was different from the normal procedure. Yet, he notes, “Put[ting] those caveats aside, that’s a lot of people saying that he did this for political reasons.”

Cutter’s response: “We can’t put the methodology of that poll aside, because the methodology was significantly biased.”

Todd goes on to emphasize that the margin was 3 to 1 and asks whether Cutter believes the poll was so biased that the numbers would be reversed if the poll were recast. Her answer—a non-answer really—is that she doesn’t want to bore the viewers with a conservation on methodology.

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I’ve posted this elsewhere, but Real Clear Politics is falling in line with this meme. RCP has dropped this poll from its average, moving Obama from +1.6 to +2.2. I am not sure what to make of it. The internals of the poll were certainly not biased: D+6 before weighting, D+3 after weighting. I know of no reason that a callback poll should be biased. RCP has included much more questionable polls in the past.

topdog on May 15, 2012 at 1:05 PM

Isn’t that the normal progressive thinking — if it isn’t what we want, then it’s flawed?

sadatoni on May 15, 2012 at 2:27 PM

Obviously racist. Oh wait, by definition, liberals cannot be racist – my bad!

tballard on May 16, 2012 at 1:11 AM