The Parallel Universe Where Mitt Leads All Polls - Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

Pretty much everything you hear from the GOP between now and election day will be attempts at stop loss for races down ticket. They still need the turn out to take the seats to control Congress.

Conservative talk radio king Rush Limbaugh senses something more nefarious in the media and university polls.

“They are designed to do exactly what I have warned you to be vigilant about and that is to depress you and suppress your vote,” Limbaugh told his listeners last week, after bringing up swing-state surveys from The Washington Post and CBS News and Quinnipiac University. “These two polls today are designed to convince everybody this election is over.”

There has always been a divide between the Republican consultant class and conservative media figures. Operatives must dwell in the real world because their jobs depend on winning and losing. The likes of Morris and Limbaugh have different incentives. They want to build their email lists and listening audiences and there’s no faster way to conservative hearts than to kick the dreaded mainstream media. And when it’s well after Labor Day of a presidential year and the Republican nominee isn’t faring well, reassuring the home team that there’s just a scoreboard malfunction offers a seeming dose of logic to the situation.

But the Internet has let the alternate campaign reality flower this fall in a way that’s both striking and depressing to political professionals and pollsters. One website, unskewedpolls.com, even readjusts the public polling to include more Republicans in samples. The results: Romney leads in nearly every national poll released in September. Of course arbitrarily reweighting polls is wildly unscientific, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans like Limbaugh and even Texas Gov. Rick Perry from mentioning the site.

“Always nice to get unfiltered, or in this case ‘unskewed,’ information,” Perry tweeted last week with a link to the page.