Now even the Romney campaign is blaming the polling firms

(via Think Progress) You have to appreciate the new idea going around Republican circles that, because Mitt Romney is now behind in all the polls, it is because there is a conspiracy among polling firms to make Mitt Romney look bad. It was funny enough when it was just one of the usual conspiracy theories among the far-right, but now the whole party has gone full Tinkerbell with it. Eric Fehrnstrom:

Some of these polls have been called into question because they assume a higher Democratic turnout in 2012 than we experienced in 2008. I don't know of any campaign operative or political scientist in the country who thinks Democrats are going to show up in the same number as they did four years ago.

Well, but that's not what's going on. Pollsters aren't presuming Democrats are going to show up in super-mega-high numbers, they're just recognizing that the demographics and party affiliations of the country keep changing. You know, like they do in every election. Of course, you could choose to believe that every polling outfit in the country is in on a conspiracy to make Mitt Romney look bad, and willing to destroy their own accuracy records in the process, so that's what they're going with. It's not that America doesn't like Mitt Romney'it's just that every one of the major American polling firms refuses to recognize just how much America really does like Mitt. Of course.

Now that this whining has reached the Mitt Romney campaign itself (in spite of their no-whining policy, which I was certain was a super-serious thing), where do they go from here? Is Fehrnstrom simply trying to keep their base from going home and drowning their sorrows in a tub of ice cream? Are they going to be making a serious push to get every major pollster to change their ratings so that it looks like Mitt is closer than he is? No'it's gotta be a fundraising thing, right? We're now going to see Republican fundraising pushes somehow tied to the mean pollsters (like Rasmussen and Fox News, those scoundrels!) and how they're trying to steal the election for Barack Obama by making conservatives feel bad.

I'm not sure what the best approach is here. On one hand, watching conservatives convince themselves of yet another conspiracy against them is very, very funny, and the mere idea of a Poll-Unskewing Tinkerbell sprinkling her magic polling dust over all of conservativeland sounds like something that needs to be made into a bad kid's cartoon right-freaking-now.

On the other hand, it might be even better to just sit back quietly and watch them all convince themselves that yes, Mitt Romney really is leading in all the polls. It can only get better from here'I'm sure that within a week or two, they will have figured out how the United Nations and/or the New Black Panthers and/or ACORN are behind these anti-Romney polling numbers. I'm not sure how yet, but give them time. They'll think of something.