Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama: Tied in Washington Times/Zogby poll

US President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium on October 8, 2012 in San Francisco, California.

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The WashTimes/Zogby poll released today showing Mitt Romney tied at 45 percent withPresident Obama is skewed by about three percent. The poll sample includes three percent more Democrats than Republicans. Unskewed, the data reveals Romney leads 46 percent to Obama's 43 percent instead of the tied result officially reported.

This WashTimes/Zogby poll, unlike many others analyzed, over-samples Democratic voters to produce a result more favorable toBarack Obama. This survey's sample includes 35 percent registered Republicans and 38 percent registered Democrats and 27 percent independents among the 800 likely voters surveyed. The poll reports a 3.5 percent margin of error.

The data from the poll allowed calculation of the support for the candidates among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Among the Democrats in the survey, 89 percent favored Obama while five percent support Romney. The Republicans in the survey chose Romney by a 91 percent to four percent margin. Those margins display a strong degree of party loyalty in each party for its candidate similar to that seen in most national polls. Independents broke for Romney by a 43 percent to 35 percent margin.

The sample for the WashTimes/Zogby poll 38 percent Democrats and 35 percent Republicans and 27 percent independents. This means Democrats are over-sampled by six percent. According to data from the latest QStarNews poll, the expected partisan make up of the electorate expected for this year's election is 34.8 percent Republicans, 35.2 percent Democrats and 30.0 independents.

Unskewing this data shows somewhat different results. With the weightings of independents, Democrats and Republicans conducted by the QStarNews poll numbers, theWashTimes/Zogby poll data would indicate a slight Romney lead of 46.33 percent to 43.22 percent for Romney, which means Romney would likely win with about 54.92 percent with support of most undecided voters if the election closed today.

This survey is not the only such poll recently to be skewed by over-sampling Democrats to skew the results in favor of Barack Obama. Last month, the previous CNN/ORC poll was similarly skewed. In August on the Fox News segment “Campaign Insiders” today, Democratic pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen both confirmed their belief that major polls are skewed in favor of the Democrats by over-sampling of Democratic voters when the surveys are conducted.

So many of these skewed polls have been unskewed here in this column they are now averaged, in unskewed form, in the new UnskewedPolls.com UnSkewed Average of Polls that today shows Romney leading by 3.0 percent.

The polls got UnSkewed, now the media gets it too -- UnSkewedMedia.com.

Let your voice be heard, take the QStarNews Daily Tracking Poll, just a few quick questions, and the full QStarNews Poll with many interesting questions.

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