Campaign 2012 has reached the stage where partisans have moved from attacking their opponents to attacking the polls. And while there's been criticism from all sides, the current state of the polls explains why the most vociferous denunciations are coming from the right. One dismayed conservative has even set up a website, unskewedpolls.com, where poll results are re-calibrated in ways that supposedly strips them of their bias.

One common complaint in the current conservative fusillade is that many 2012 polls are using the “2008 turnout model.” Karl Rove, for instance, alleges that the pollsters are weighting their surveys to reflect the partisan and racial composition of the 2008 electorate–when Democrats outnumbered their Republican counterparts by 7 points on election day. Conservative critics think the GOP’s enthusiasm to oust President Obama means that differential will be a lot smaller this year. That might be valid, but the implication that polls are rigged to reflect the 2008 electorate is outright misleading: most of this year’s polls don’t use “the 2008 turnout model.”

In fact, the “2008 turnout model” critique is so far off base that responding to it simply entails explaining how polls work.

Most pollsters don’t weight their polls to match a preconceived electorate. Instead, they take a demographically representative sample based on actual figures from the US census and then let respondents speak for themselves about whether they’re voting for Obama or Romney. For illustrative purposes, consider the Bloomberg/Selzer poll. They started by taking a sample of all American adults, weighted to match the demographics of all adults in the US census, like, race, education, and marital status. To produce a likely voter sample, they then would have excluded adults who weren’t registered to vote and then asked a series of questions to help determine who was likely to vote.

Ultimately, Selzer’s sample found Obama leading by 6 points, by 49-43. Whatever you think of the outcome, it wasn’t the result of Selzer imposing her assumptions upon the sample; she let her sample speak for itself. Did she take a good sample? We’ll find out on Election Day. But if she’s wrong, it won’t be because she used the “2008 turnout model.” In fact, this particular poll had a relatively innocuous Democratic advantage of 6 or 2 points among likely voters, depending on whether you include leaners. But even if Selzer had shown something “crazy” like R+5 for D+15, remember that the party-ID of the sample wouldn’t have been determined by Selzer’s premonitions.