Effeminate!

Effeminate!

It's clear that the battleground polling , no matter what the national polls might say, shows President Barack Obama with a healthy Electoral College lead in the low 300s. Give Romney another state or two, and he's still far from the 270 he needs to get elected president.

Thus, the GOP machine has invested heavily into the notion that Romney has "momentum" and is inevitable. They have convinced their legions of lemmings that yes, Romney is headed toward a landslide victory over Obama!

Part of their evidence is Romney's first debate polling surge. Polling that couldn't be trusted because it was skewed was suddenly quite accurate! Problem is, that bump ended up being just that—a bump. Romney undoubtedly is in better shape now than he was in the summer, but the polls are tied nationally, and Obama leads in the states. That's just a fact.

So what do Republicans do? They attack those facts. And chief in their sights today is Nate Silver, whose data-driven model has combated the very existence of Mittmentum.

The criticism has stemmed from the silly:



Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he's made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

So why hasn’t Silver adjusted accordingly? It could be that he is just frankly smarter than all the other pollsters, pundits and predictors. Maybe he just got lucky last time? Or maybe it’s wishful thinking? — Silver was up front about being an Obama supporter in 2008, and it’s hard to blame conservatives for wondering if he might be working the refs.

[T]he right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all. This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.

To the stupid To outright denial:Krugman responds This attack on Nate didn't start today. DefiantOne was diaring about it last Monday. It's just picking up steam as the polling turns further away from Romney. The worse the numbers, the more the need to "unskew" and attack any objective analysis of the numbers.

And it's gotten so bad that now Jennifer Rubin is attacking the whole concept of poll aggregating because it makes it harder to cherry pick those Rasmussen and Gravis polls to buck up the troops.

Here's the crazy thing, though. Despite this full-court press (with some media acquiescence) to create a self-fulfilling impression that Romney is winning, people aren't buying it. From Pew's latest, which has the race tied 47-47:



Overall, more voters continue to expect Barack Obama to win the election (49%) than think Romney will win (31%).

The usual 31 percent fringe has let Fox and Limbaugh convince them victory is inevitable next Tuesday.

That misplaced certainty will make their defeat that much sweeter.