Who is defending Gravis? I think everyone agrees it's junk. But IMO any non-fraudulent poll that isn't a campaign's internal should be entered into the database.
Sounds about right, even if it is Gravis.
Gravis is consistently bad in a specific way. If anything, this suggests Orman is ahead by more
This. Gravis is showing Hillary doing horribly in all of the four states they've polled to date; California, Connecticut, Nevada and Iowa. Gravis has had an extreme R bias all year long. So taking that into account, Orman should be up by 10% at least.
I mean, Gravis showing Hillary would do 14% worse than Obama in California? Come on! Give me a break.
Gravis is never overly favorable to Democrats, so this is good.
I was not defending Gravis
Do you disagree that we can generally treat them as Republican internals?
Perhaps "defending" was the wrong word. But twisting it to fit your opinions? yes. As we've seen with the past 5+ polls, they are not wrong in a "certain way"
I thought the "
" was enough to make it clear that I was kidding when I said that the Gravis poll meant that Orman was probably leading by more than 7%. Despite the recent batch of polls, I still think most Gravis polls can be treated as Republican internals (particularly given the firm's history). It may turn out that (like Rasmussen) Gravis has shifted from being consistently awful in a predictable way to being consistently awful in unpredictable ways, but I don't think we can say for sure whether that's the case or Gravis' last few polls were anomalies. As others have noted, it is also not uncommon for bad pollsters to try to copy the results of credible firms in places where the latter are doing some of their best work in the 4-6 weeks before the election. I don't see how I "twisted" that poll to fit my belief that Orman was and is currently leading Roberts (although I definitely agree that two of the other posters you used as examples were doing so, I don't think Jfern was twisting the results either). Ironically, I'm slightly less confident right now about Orman winning than I was before the poll came out, but that's just due to the Fox (although they seem to be in October hack mode with their polling) and CNN (despite their reputation for having a ridiculous likely voter screen, IIRC) polls.
While Orman is probably still ahead and the race appears to be lean I right now, I'd still like to see another PPP poll here. I believe they're going to do a Kansas poll soon, so we'll know more then. If PPP still has Orman ahead (especially if he either leads by 4-5%), then it is probably safe to say there won't be a Roberts comeback. I believe even Tmth (my apologies if I'm misremembering) was initially saying that we'd see a Roberts/Brownback surge around October 1st. Several folks predicting Brownback and Roberts victories conceded that if Davis and Orman were still ahead after the first week of October, then Brownback and Roberts were probably toast. It is debatable whether there has been a Brownback mini-surge (and if so, whether it was/is large enough to save him) and PPP should also help answer that question; but I don't think we've really seen much evidence of a Roberts surge.