We cannot know the precise enumeration of "so many people," because we don't know how many were listening to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, but the answer to Rush's "why" comes with inherent ease: "Why do you think so many people in this country are stupid?"
Try this. According to Rush--and now, presumably, many "informed" people--the villainy behind all this left-wing polling (e.g. the latest New York Times/Quinnipiac/CBS News poll) showing Obama with substantial leads in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania is almost too conspicuous to note, and its preposterousness a cinch to disprove. How?
The problem out there is Rasmussen. Rasmussen has the race tied [nationally] at 46.
Come on, now. Don't laugh. Rush is trying to be serious and educational here. The statistical jokes of Rasmussen and Unskewed Polls (which he cites with admiration) and the unnoted, riotously dumb conflation of state and national polling are all Rush has got. So back off, man. He's a scientist.
And you know what? "[I]f you take every one of these [Romney-unfavorable] polls," says Rush, "and you exchange the sample"--you know, just exchange the sample, just, just, just exchange the goddamn inconvenient thing--"You find Romney up by anywhere from six to nine points, and, in some cases, ten points." Hurray!
I'm not making this up.
Rush prefers 2010's voter turnout as a methodological guide to 2012, the absurdity of which I was going to spend some time on, but I'm already sick of writing about this idiot and I wanted to get the next part in.
[Y]ou've got an attempt here to set up the idea that there has to have been some fraud because every poll had Obama winning by double digits or high single digits, and then Romney wins by five points, the left, you know these people. The first thing they're gonna think of is they had the election stolen from 'em and they're gonna start raising holy hell. The real vote will not matter to them if it's that drastically different from all these polls. Hillary Clinton told an ACORN audience that elections were stolen in Ohio in 2004. She told an ACORN audience that. They're not incapable of all this. They're totally capable of everything I have been and will be describing to you.
As always, in Rush's conspiratorially fevered brain the culprits of Hillary and ACORN stand immeasurably and wickedly tall. Yet Rush is accurately on to one thing--the "raising holy hell" thing.
Forget the polls, forget the statistical ups and downs and all the increasingly uniform forecasts of a total Romney meltdown. Consider, instead, only this: If, on the day that ultimately matters, Election Day, millions of minorities in thousands of towns are thwarted in dozens of already predicted ways by right-wing bureaucratic goons, then we will indeed see a lot of righteous and holy hell raised. It won't exactly be pretty, though.