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In early 2012, Virginia-based Republican activist Dean Chambers began to question the accuracy of many polls, conducted by major media organizations, showing President Barack Obama leading by double digits over Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. On the program “The Beltway Boys” on the Fox News Channel, Democrat-leaning pollster and political consultant Doug Schoen illustrated how one of the polls had sampled a disproportionately higher percentage of Democrat voters, leading to a result showing Obama with a large lead over Romney. Using data published by Rasmussen Reports on the partisan makeup of the electorate, Chambers developed a method of re-weighting the polls, using their reported demographic information, to re-calculate the results as if those polls had used Rasmussen's partisan numbers. The resulting “unskewed polls” generally showed Romney leading.
Working as a free-lance writer for the now defunct news site Examiner.com as well as his own web sites, Chamber began writing article about the polls and publishing his “unskewed” results. The CNN/ORC poll published September 10, 2012 showed Obama leading by double digits using a sample that had a large sample percent Democrats, about 20 percent Republicans, and very small sample of independent voters, which Chambers said was “triply skewed” because it under-sampled Republican and independent voters. The next day, syndicated conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh read Chambers' Examiner.com article about that poll on his radio program.
Soon after that, Chambers created the web site UnskwedPolls.com, that featured his articles on the polls s well as an “unskewed” average of the polls, modeled after the Real Clear Politics average of the polls. Soon the web site was posted on Twitter by conservative celebrities including Governor Rick Perry, and Limbaugh's brother, attorney and conservative author David Limbaugh. The site proved popular with conservatives and heavily criticized by progressives while being red by activists on both sides. One image upload to the web showed Mitt Romney quoted as saying “show me the unskewed polls in this election.”
Chambers attracted some controversy in October of 2012 by referring to political pundit Nate Silver using Limbaugh's term “the new castrati,” which many considered an attack on Silver's sexual orientation. Writing days later, Chambers apologized for the comment and stated it was a mistake.
In 2016, the polls were criticized again for showing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with large leads over businessman Donald Trump. The most notable pollster predicting a Trump win in 2016 was Robert Cahaly of The Trafalgar Group, whose polls showed Trump tied or leading in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won in 2016. Cahaly, differing with most other pollsters, found a way to measure what he called the “shy Trump voters,” those who would not admit to pollsters they planned to vote for Trump.
In 2020, Cahaly once again predicted Trump would defeat former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden is projected by news outlets to have won 306 electoral votes to 232 by Trump, the election is under recounts and election challenges from Preside tn Trump.
YouTube-based political pundit Red Eagle Politics also predicted a Trump win in 2020, and was one of the few observers to correctly predict Republicans holding the Senate majority and gaining House seats. Chambers predicted a 52-48 Senate and the House at 232 Democrats and 203 Republicans. At this time, the House appears it will include at least 218 Democrats and 203 Republicans with 14 races not yet called. Of those 14, Republicans led in 10 of them. Republican will hold 52 seats by winning both the runoff elections in Georgia.