Ron Paul Spells Trouble For Obama?

Well, if you conservatives that swallow polls hole like so much bitter conservative candy.

That's being said, Allah at Hot Air brings his own particular blend of conservative spin to this.

He leads each of the top GOP contenders by margins that are reasonably healthy, especially in light of the fact that his approval’s headed down the toilet over ObamaCare. That’s because Romney, Huck, and Palin all bring their own baggage to the hypothetical whereas Bush and Paul are more symbolic — Paul because his agenda is probably unknown to most voters (i.e. he’s baggage-less) and Bush because, of course, he embodies the pre-Obamanomics era. In their own way, each is a much purer “Anybody But Obama” choice than the current crop of Republicans.

Allahpundit is a peculiar animal in the realm of Hot Air. His headlines are quite misleading and his semi-cogent prose is somewhat out of place for the particular blog that employs him. He seems to know the reality behind his misinformation but favors staying part of a wildly popular website connected to Michelle Malkin so long as his voice, for what it's worth, is being pushed more than other conservatives. In that respect, he's a much more subdued Glenn Beck without all the preposterous conspiracy theories. After all, Beck recently told Forbes he didn't care about the political process, but to see his nightly show on Fox"News" you'd think otherwise.

Here's where his latest piece reveals what Hot Air is really about.

Nate Silver sampled several polls and weighted for different factors to determine that Huckabee and Romney, not Paul, actually do best head-to-head with The One. That’s useful but no fun; the fun poll, of course, would be an HA reader survey to see where you guys stand on the thorny hypothetical of an Obama/Paul race.

Nate Silver sampled several polls and weighted for different factors to determine that Huckabee and Romney, not Paul,

Yeah, it's no fun looking at the realities of polling and a pollster that Republicans favor. It would be more fun to have a wildly unscientific polls where members could vote multiple times in order to favor the Republican over the Democrat.

Here's another problem with Allah's statement.

...as regular readers of this website will know, the person conducting the poll can have a profound impact on its results. Rasmussen, in particular, has had a substantial Republican-leaning house effect thus far this year. Perhaps they will turn out to be right (although their idea of trying to apply a "likely voter" model 2.5 years in advance of an election is dubious). But it would be wrong to take a Rasmussen poll (or any other) at face value without taking into account this context.

Instead, I've compiled all polls conducted since July of last year(**) that test Obama against a Republican opponent. For this exercise, I use the Real Clear Politics rule of only using one poll from each firm for each matchup (the most recent). I then adjust the polls for house effects using a simplified variation of our standard method; both Presidential approval polls and the numbers from these 2012 matchups are used to calibrate the house effect.

See this graphic:



You see that name, the 4th one down on the Right. That's Ron Paul. What was it that Allah said?

Nate Silver sampled several polls and weighted for different factors to determine that Huckabee and Romney, not Paul....

Oops, seems like somebody wasn't paying attention.

This is just another classic example of how conservatives are more than willing to skew results, and actively ask for results to be contorted, in order for their ideological blatherings to be validated.