Today's Rasmussen poll in Connecticut is very enlightening

Oh Rasmussen, how you crack me up. CT is not PA or MI.

Rasmussen is becoming out of touch. Who the hell are they polling? All the baby boomers in Litchfield County (the reddest part of the state)?

Thanks for the laughs. Obvious Rasmussen is having issues with all of it's polling then. And Murphy ahead by one point? Quinnipiac had it 6 points today and Survey USA had it Murphy plus 4. Rasmussen did have the race less close a month ago, when Murphy was behind in Quinnipiac by a point.

The timing was very suspicious.

I think after this election, we'll have a "come to Jesus" moment about the polls. It really feels like they've decided if they're now just one pollster among hundreds, they might as well work hard to game the system. Now that the Nate Silvers of the world are gaining attention for averaging polls, the right-biased polls are doing their damnedest to form the narrative by offsetting gains. I don't think they make up numbers so much as they use ridiculous likely voter screens to f$%k everything up. Time will tell.

If any pollster fails to approximate the real outcome by a modest margin, I think these poll averaging sites should punish them by dropping them from the list. It's common sense.

That would make Romney look better when Real Clear Politics aggregates the polls. Rasmussen has to be WAY different, just like it usually is.

I think they do real actual polling but weight it to favor Repubs.
I have lived in CT all 36 years of my life and CT has not gone red since 1988. 1992 was the smallest margin and that was because of Ross Perot. So Rasmussen is telling me the margin of victory would be close to 1992 when Clinton won by about 6 points in CT? For real?
I question a lot of their state polling.

... and it was as if my flight had been diverted to a Republican fantasy-land in the bible belt.
These are excerpts from the letters to the editor in a local paper.
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- "what is fair when those who pay millions in taxes have only one vote while those paying no taxes have an equal vote?"
- "Obama is a shill for his radical Socialist and Communist czars."
- "I believe that government welfare and food stamp takers should not have the right to vote."
- "During the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy, a Republican, fought to expose the infiltration of Communists in government, but was censured by the Senate. Today, he is vindicated."
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This was not some rural backwater: it was in a well-to-do-community in one of the richest counties in the country.

With the emergence of the Tea Party, extremists have crawled out of the closet and seemingly have less to fear from voicing their opinions. I don't see any evidence that GOP moderates have suddenly become right wingers. In fact, may of them have left the party. There will be a price to pay for the public perception that the GOP has gone whacko, and the inevitable outcome of the Mourdock rape-pregnancy-God analogy flap is but one example.

My own father is very conservative and says Obama was not born in America. But there are more moderates here which counter the nuts.