The closer Election Day looms, the more often New York Times'
golden-boy pollster Nate Silver is thrust from his Five-Thirty-Eight
blog into the print edition with another poll analysis rallying the
troops for Obama. In last Saturday's paper Silver, who has been
optimistic about Obama's chances in the fact of rising poll numbers for
Romney, dismissed results from Gallup's tracking poll showing wide leads
for Romney in "Gallup vs. the World [1]." He also boosted Obama in Tuesday's print edition: "We calculate Mr. Obama’s odds of re-election as being about two chances out of three."
On Friday he wrote "Gaining Momentum, Whatever That Is [2]," adapted from a blog post whose headline was more explicit: "In Polls, Romney’s Momentum Seems to Have Stopped."
Michael Cooper eagerly jumped on the bandwagon with his Thursday "Caucus" post, "Has Romney’s Rise in Polls Stopped? [3]" Cooper had shown no interest in the three weeks of polls showing Romney's poll numbers sharply improving, but now that Romney's surge may have stalled, he asks:
Is there Ro-mentum, or is it faux-mentum?
A debate has been raging among polling analysts and commentators about whether Mitt Romney is still gaining ground, as he did after the first debate, or if his bounce has slowed or stalled. But while some Republicans say that they still have the wind at their backs, several polling analysts weighed in recently to argue that the data suggests there is no longer a Romney surge.
Of course he cites Silver's blog post on the myth of momentum:
Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog in The New York Times, wrote Thursday: “Mr. Romney clearly gained ground in the polls in the week or two after the Denver debate, putting himself in a much stronger overall position in the race. However, it seems that he is no longer doing so.”
-- Clay Waters is Editor of the MRC's TimesWatch [4] site.