Lots of rumors swirling about why the Des Moines Register canceled the release of its final poll before the caucuses tomorrow night. The official word from the paper is that there was some kind of error or omission on some of the sampling calls, but this ought not to be a fatal problem for polling today. Pollsters routinely balance and weight their raw data to correct for a variety of errors and other factors. Could be that the real story is the poll might have been manipulated or corrupted in some nefarious way. We do live in a strange time when a news organization sponsors a poll, and then reports on its own poll as “breaking news.” I’ve long anticipated that there might be a polling scandal some day. In any case, some rumors say the unreleased poll found Bernie Sanders running away with the caucuses and Biden sinking like a stone, and this might have spooked the Register.

The signs that the Democratic Party is panicking about Sanders are out in the open. Politico reports that Democrats are considering changing the convention rules to allow their superdelegates to vote on the first ballot after all, a clear bid to derail Sanders:

A small group of Democratic National Committee members has privately begun gauging support for a plan to potentially weaken Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and head off a brokered convention. In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention. Such a move would increase the influence of DNC members, members of Congress and other top party officials, who now must wait until the second ballot to have their say if the convention is contested.

If this happens, watch for Bernie Bros to riot in the streets in Milwaukee.

Even more brazen is the change to the debate eligibility rules to allow Michael Bloomberg to appear in the next candidate debate. (You can read all about it at . . . Bloomberg News! Heh.) Guess who’s not happy about this? Michael Moore, who you can nowadays spot from the international space station with the naked eye:

Complaints from an overweight white guy from the midwest about a too-white candidate field is peak liberal guilt diversity-speak!

Well, at least Bernie is buying carbon offsets for all of the private jet travel he’s taking! Such virtue!

Looks like I’m going to start in on the popcorn hours before kickoff.

JOHN adds: Mike Cernovich claims to have the Register poll results that were quashed. They were bound to leak. I haven’t gone back to check against past Register polls, but the salient point would seem to be Biden sinking like a stone:

Des Moines Iowa poll was spiked, here are the results: Sanders: 22% Warren: 18% Buttigieg: 16% Biden: 13% — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 2, 2020



I don’t know how you can poll caucuses. How does a pollster identify the tiny handful of people who are willing and able to devote hours to the caucus process? Seems impossible to me, but one thing seems highly probable: of the leading candidates, Biden’s supporters are least likely to be passionate enough to invest the time and trouble.