Get out the tin-foil, Rachel Alexander needs a new hat.
Alexander, the former leader of the Andrew Thomas cheer squad, seems to think there's a conspiracy among Rocky Mountain pollsters who "doctored" the numbers in a recent poll to give John McCain a huge lead over his GOP Senate primary opponent J.D. Hayworth.
The poll, released Wednesday, shows McCain now has a 45-point lead over Hayworth following the news that Hayworth appeared in an infomercial as a pitchman for "free government money."
Alexander, who happens to be the Hayworth campaign's director of social media, immediately took to her uber-conservative blog, Intellectual Conservative, to charge the pollsters with cookin' the books.
In a post she titled Rocky Mountain Poll doctored to give McCain big Lead over Hayworth, Alexander claims the following:
Instead of surveying "likely Republican voters," which would realistically predict the actual outcome of the primary, the poll surveyed one-third Independents and two-thirds registered Republican voters. Independents are generally split down the middle between Republican voters and Democrat voters (who could choose to vote in the Democrat primary instead, which has at least one realistic candidate), so they are going to favor the more liberal candidate, and are not as likely to vote as Republicans - and certainly not asBased on Alexander's logic, it doesn't it seem as though anything was "doctored" -- as she claims in her headline -- but more that somebody's got a case of sour grapes.
likely to vote as likely Republican voters.
Michele Larson and Barry Young, talk show hosts on KFYI -- the former home of Hayworth's radio show -- even spent some time talking about how outlandish Alexander's claims seem.
Check it out below.
Alexander concludes her post with a little Hayworth pep rally before calling on Scott Rasmussen to come and save the day by conducting (heh) a "realistic" poll.
Check out more of Alexander's ramblings here.