It's quite another to raise a skeptical eye at Doug Kaplan and his merry band of know-nothing fax-spammers. The trick that makes a con work is to associate it with something more trustworthy. Whether Gravis is even running any polls at all is a question, I think, for debate, in a way it never is for Gallup, Ipsos, Quinnipiac, or even Rasmussen. Given what we now know about Gravis, leading into any discussion of their so-called "polls" with a massive disclaimer seems the only reasonable and honest thing to do.
Posting a Gravis poll and simply noting that "this pollster" (is it a real pollster? i don't know that!) simply "leans Republican" strikes me as disingenuous, to say the least. For all appearances, Gravis is a shell company of hucksters - there's no real foundation for even determining that they run any polls at all. That should be reflected in our descriptions of their results.
Denying Gallup and Ipsos and Quinnipiac and Rasmussen and university polls of all stripes in the aggregate is certainly a dubious act of "poll trutherism."
Presenting Gravis as if it may not even be a real poll strikes me now as common sense.
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