The media are continuing their relentless drum beat of national opinion polls, most showing Hillary Clinton with a solid lead over her nearest opponent. Surely, then, the coronation of Hillary as the Democratic Party’s nominee is all but complete, and anyone who supports another candidate might as well throw in the towel months before the first primary - right?

Well, maybe not. First, there are reasons to cast a skeptical eye toward at least some of these polls. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Rupert Murdoch organized a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, and I’ve noticed that his FOX News polls sometimes give Hillary a considerably larger lead than other polls. You might think CNN is a safer bet, but CNN has contracted their polling to infoUSA’s Opinion Research. infoUSA is run by Vinod Gupta, an ardent Clinton supporter who infuriated his own shareholders by giving Bill Clinton millions of dollars of infoUSA’s money in the form of trips to Acapulco and generous “consulting fees”. Trusting a CNN/InfoUSA poll to tell you about Hillary Clinton’s popularity seems a lot like trusting a (Republican-activist-run) Diebold voting machine to tell you whether George W. Bush just won a close election.

Now, I’m not willing to say that all of the national polls are biased - the overall picture they paint might be roughly accurate. But the bigger question to me is whether these national polls are even remotely relevant to predicting the outcome of the nomination. Right now all of the candidates are focusing intensely on a few early voting states - namely Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. And in these states the race is very tight. A recent poll in all-important Iowa suggests a three-way tie for the lead. And recent polls have suggested a tie between Obama and Clinton in New Hampshire, and a come-from-behind lead for Obama in South Carolina.

Thus, the situation in the only states where the candidates have truly presented themselves to the voters contrasts sharply with the media’s depiction of Hillary Clinton as the dominant frontrunner. Surely, many in the media must realize that national polls are mainly just registering prior name recognition, and yet they keep slapping us with the same red herring.

Video clip: Zennie Abraham says USA Today’s Gallup polling guy wanted a “do-over” after Obama tied Clinton in their national poll.