Romney Campaign Doubts Polls Showing Obama Lead Nearly every national poll shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney. Gallup, Ipsos and Bloomberg all have the president up by six points. The RAND Corporation puts Mr. Obama up by seven and a half. Only Rasmussen has Mr. Romney up nationally among likely voters, by two points. Swing state surveys also give Mr. Obama the advantage, with new polls from The New York Times, CBS and Quinnipiac showing Mr. Obama up between 9 and 11 points in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. There's still more than a month until the election. Mr. Obama could lose. Mr. Romney could win. Hanging chads could leave the result up to the Supreme Court. But at the moment it's rational to conclude that Mr. Obama has a better chance of winning. Unless you're on the Romney campaign, or you're a right-wing pundit, in which case it's only natural-in a seven stages of grief sort of way-to conclude that the polls are all wrong. On Tuesday Rich Beeson, the Romney campaign's political director, told reporters: "The public polls are what the public polls are. I kind of hope the Obama campaign is basing their campaign decisions on the public polls I have great faith in our data. A new Washington Post poll has Mr. Romney down by 8 points in Ohio, but Mr. Beeson said "We are, by any stretch, inside the margin of error in Ohio." Then on Wednesday Ed Gillespie, a senior advisor to the Romney campaign, said on Fox & Friends that the public polls "are not consistent with our polling." In which case, why not make the internal data public? One common kvetch is that polling organizations (with the exception of Rasmussen) are over-sampling Democrats, and therefore don't accurately reflect the electorate. Hugh Hewitt, the radio host, yesterday tweeted "NYT/Quinnipiac is junk, with +9 Ds in Ohio and FLA samples and +11Ds in PA in sample." A Tuesday Fox News segment on how to read "the fine print on political polls" referred to a "continuing discussion" on whether recent surveys include "too many Democrats." Pollsters counter that it would be unscientific to adjust surveys according to party-ID targets (by modifying otherwise random samples to arrive at a 50-50 split), and that swing voters often identify with whatever party they favor at the moment (they'll call themselves Democrats if they're planning to vote for a Democrat). Moreover, as Chris Cillizza wrote recently in The Washington Post, "the simple truth is that Democrats have long enjoyed an edge on the party ID question." The party-ID issue gets technical, but the growing class of emotionally unstable pundits thinks there's a full-blown conspiracy afoot. On his radio show Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh said: The purpose of the people right now, most of them doing these polls, they're trying to make news, not reflect it, they're advancing an agenda. They're all Democrats. They're all liberals. They just have different jobs. The polls are the replacement refs. They see certain things. They don't see other things. They don't call certain things, and other things go by. In this case, what they're trying to do is exactly what they've done in your case: frustrate you, make you pull your hair out, say, what the hell's happening to the country? Sean Hannity also thinks the media-industrial complex is trying to dampen enthusiasm among Republicans: "The narrative the media would like to advance is, this is over, don't even bother paying attention, let's move on. That's not true by any stretch. These polls are so skewed, so phony, that we need to start paying attention to what's going on so that you won't be deflated. The National Review recently published an unusually paranoid version of the poll-plot, with John McLaughlin, the Republican pollster, suggesting that the corruption goes to the very top. The president and his allies "want to convince" right-wing voters "falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. Here's another conspiracy theory: If Mr. Obama goes on to win the election, Mr. Limbaugh et al will recycle this narrative to sow doubt about the results.