No, no, no. Polls include a prediction of turnout. That's the point of their likely voter models. They were telling you who was going to go to the polls already, yet the Romney campaign (and essentially all of the conservative establishment) chose to willfully ignore that data on the back of some cherry picked numbers (e.g. Rassmussen) and a set of "unskewed" models that were simply wrong.

There was never any data for that. It was all (incorrect) analysis. So don't say that there was data to support the position, there wasn't.

And the "enthusiasm" numbers were from early in the spring, before likely voter probing can be done. That stuff all disappears once the LV polls start coming out post-primaries.

No, it doesn't. Some polls ask about enthusiasm right up until election day.

Again, this is not about unskewing. This is about data as it was actually reported directly on the page.

Here's one of the polls directly referenced in the link I included in previous post. NPR Poll Oct 23-25, 2012. Just before the election. http://media.npr.org/documents/2012/oct/NPROctpoll.pdf

There's a 10 point scale that gives a 10 percent difference in enthusiasm to Republicans at the "10" level.

Of course that advantage vanishes if you include "8-10", which could be the sort of mistake Romney's internal pollsters made.

The poll only includes Likely Voters.

So there was data in public polls just before the election reflecting an enthusiasm advantage for Republicans. To say there wasn't is simply wrong.

I'm just at a loss. The poll told you how many voters it thought would appear, based on factors including internal modelling and the enthusiasm quesiton. And your argument is that you should throw the aggregate data out based on that one number, that they already included? That's insane; it's quite literally cherry picking.

And, of course, it's just flat wrong. That you would defend this behavior is just beyond me. It was a mistake, it wasn't ever a reasonable interpretation of the data, and plenty of smart people said so at the time.

The enthusiasm is a measure among the reported data. Not among the survey sample. The data was culled for likely voters, then the enthusiasm spread was among those that survived the cut. At the bottom of each page it says the results are all from the weighted sample.

The concept here is that "likely" is a continuum, and the Republicans had an advantage at the extreme upper end of it.

EDIT- Adding a note and then moving on from this. I understand you're saying the enthusiasm is baked into the final preference percentages, but that's not the case.