ties with a virginia based consulting group it has paid $3 million to this year alone. the group is being investigated for voter fraud in nine counties in florida. right now, my story of the week. the republican bubble trap. if you follow politics, you've probably noticed that polling of the presidential election has swung quite decidedly in the president's favor over the last couple of weeks. the real clear politics polling average now has obama up 4.1 points over mitt romney in national poles. nate silver's prediction model put barack obama's odds of winning the election above 80% for the first time ever. swing state polling just this week seems to confirm the trend. a new quinnipiac "new york times" cbs poll shows surprisingly strong leads for the president. the galup tracking poll shows obama up six points. it's pretty hard to survey the polling data and not come to the conclusion that barack obama is beating mitt romney, that if the election were held today barack obama would win and that romney has a relatively steep though certainly not insurmountable uphill climb to victory. that is if you operate in the alternate epi stem mick universe of the media. >> that begs the question, are these polls dishonest? >> no. look, we endo you them with a falls scientific precision. >> these polls, i don't pay attention to them. >> polling is very good at saying how you're going to vote. it's very bad at saying who's going to vote. >> these two polls today are designed to convince everybody this election is over. >> we should note that fox news's own polls have been pretty much in line with everyone else's, but it's not just observers making the claim the polls are rigged. the romney campaign itself is now getting in on the act. >> some of these polls have been called into question because they assume a higher democratic turnout in 2012 than we experienced in 2008. >> for the record, that's not really true, but that doesn't matter. conservatives are spending hundreds, maybe thousands of man hours, far more appropriately bro hours writing long, tortured pseudo statistical analyses of these polls. the proprietor of one of the go to sites of this analysis unskewed polls.com told us it has gone from 15,000 hitsds a day and 200,000. the sites founder dean chambers is planning an expansion. i have a been hearing from people inside the tea party movement and republican movement calling to say what i'm doing. they're glad to see that someone's questioning the credibility of national polls. now to the conservatives and republicans watching out there right now, i know what you're thinking. it's not just people on the right who fall victim to this way of thinking. you're right. in fact, i can recall with somewhat pathetic acuity spending hours on the internet in the waning days of the 2000 election why the lack of cell phones led to underreporting john kerry's strength. we all as humans are subject to confirmation bias. the urge to confirm our ideological priers. the problem is the institutional structure slavishly caters to this disposition. the institutional and market incentives on the right all push towards feeding the audience what they want to hear and make a good buck while doing it at the expense of actually giving them a handle on some basic aspects of reality. glen beck left fox news to create his own hermetically sealed media environment. he has a radio show, his own website and tv network where the latter first runs stories reported by the former. while his audience has shrunk dramatically, npr reports his company, the blaze, is expected to rake in more than $40 million this year. his radio contract just doubled to 100 million over the next five years. the increasingly claustrophobic parallel universe isn't something that lefties like myself have noticed. julia sanchez coined the term epi stem mick closure which is found in the multimedia array of blogs, radio programs and magazines and of course fox news where, quote, whatever conflicts with reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media and is therefore incompetent so he fak tow not to be trusted. this epi stem mick closure can render the ecosystem fragile. i think we are seeing right now just how prophetic sanchez was. the political problems the republican party is facing, losing ground not only in the general election but a wide swath of congressional races is due to the fact that the elites of that party have become so used to operating within the confines of conservatism they've forgotten how to persuade people who don't already agree with them. the we built this theme from the republican administration was a tone deaf joke that played off a gaffe that didn't resonate with the general electorate. look at the difference between clint eastwood's speech inside the hall to outside the hall where it was met with something more like confused amusement. and the ultimate example of the cost of the conservative bubble are mitt romney's 47% comments, versions of which have become common place to the point of cliche in right wing circles and ones in which romney offered inside the safety and conservative bubble and it was leaked out. in the song, 10 crack commandments biggie smalls offered a set of rules for drug dealers who want to avoid perils. >> never get high on your own supply. >> same with political strategists. don't start believing that everyone out there in the voting booth is seeing the world the way you do. the gop has i think lost sight of this simple wisdom. they are now smoking what they're dealing. it's a big part of why those poll numbers look the way they do and a good reminder of the dysfunction and incompetence that happen when people in charge only listen to themselves. i'm going to talk to my panel about the consequences of living inside the conservative bubble when we get back. maybe new buildings? 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[ male announcer ] the spark business card from capital one. choose unlimited rewards with 2% cash back or double miles on every purchase, every day! what's in your wallet? here's your invoice. increasingly cramped confines of the conservative bubble in which i think a lot of political operatives are operating and how that is hurting them in the general election possibly is a good clue as to why mitt romney's not winning the presidential election, why he's down, and why also other congressional candidates and senate candidates are doing poorly. right now i'm joined by sheila bair, author of "bull by the horns fighting to save main street from wall street and wall street from itself." . she's worked as research and director council to republican bob dole. great to have you here. joe weisenthal, deputy editor at business insider. msnbc joy reid at our sister website thegrio.com. and josh barro. it was 90 billion views? >> we're pushing 100 billion. >> paid views, yes. >> i'm going to retire. >> that's right. off the royalties from that. if only. if only every writer in america -- >> isn't that how it works? >> isn't that how it works? i found the polling stuff to be kind of remarkable this week. you know, the polling i think, look, let's not overstate how accurate polls are. there's margins of error and it's also possible that we are systematically getting something wrong. there were models in the big wall street banks tharp systematically miss pricing real estate. i think if you're empirically minded and look at the data, the president is winning the race. his lead has increased over the past, you know, month or so. it looks like from the polling we're seeing the 47% comments have hurt him. and -- have like what tht of it is. i mean, maybe you're right, but then isn't it all just going to on election day be exposed as like -- i'm just fascinated by the growth of this industry, joe. >> well, one of the things that i see, and this is outside of politics because i write about economics so much, is i use charts a lot in my writing, you know, comparing public sector employment, private sector. i see the same thing all the time. this aggression against data or they're convinced that all data is manipulated darks at that is a lie. if i show that private sector employment has actually done relatively well under obama, relatively well compared to past recoveries and most of the job losses have been in the public sector, people think it's a lie. the debate ends because i can't, you know -- there's nowhere to go from there. they refuse to believe it. i see this happen -- so i see this happen all the time. i think what i thought when i saw the unskewed polls.com site, this is really embarrassing. this is like normal people escaping to the shelter of this poll, the site went up a week ago. when we put up posts about it, we were getting tons of search hits for it. so there's this huge thirst. as you said, i remember during past elections, every losing candidate has had this. the hillary voters in the 2008 primary had their own circle. they were convinced that the support for obama was way overstated. you were totally right about 2004, the 2002. like every election this happens, but the weird how this really happened in the last week was kind of remarkable. >> isn't this -- i think this is sort of a subset of a larger trend on the right? it's been going on for a really long time. there's a sort of combination of self-pity and sort of feeding the idea that they are victims of this massive conspiracy by the left to lie about everything and that they are truly the majority. i've been calling it the fun house mirror. i love your characterization of it even more. but there is this notion that everything is a lie. climate change is a lie. the idea that liberals are just lying to you all the time. this distrust of media, distrust of numbers, distrust of data. everything is a lie. >> it's also funny because a lot of the paul ryan supporters, it's not politics. it's math. liberals talk about science and now conservatives are like all of this budget stuff, sorry, is just math. we have to slash medicare and so forth. so it is funny that the party of math now is like creating their own -- >> alternate polling. >> sheila, i want to get your thoughts on this. i want to note for people watching this, josh, you worked on mitt romney's 2002 gubernatorial campaign. >> that's right. >> you've been a republican -- i don't know if you are a registered republican. >> i am. >> you worked for bob dole. i want to make sure people watching, we're not a bunch of liberals talking about those crazy people out there because you've been in the republican party. you worked on the republican party. i think you consider yourself a republican now? >> absolutely. >> i'm curious what you make of this. am i wrong? is this a natural human instinct that the internet cult at this vats and people do it or is there a broader issue here with this kind of turning inward if that's happened i think among the right? >> well, i think it's kind of a silly debate about the polls. you're right, all the polls are showing consistent trends. i think where republicans should be focusing is their message and their message is not resonating. what my generation is saying, they're listening to the wrong rhetoric. >> as opposed to getting high on your own supply? >> that's right. so i think bill clinton really nailed it at the convention. he said -- i think you do have a point, the economy is not in good shape. the middle voters, which are the voters -- who are the voters that mitt romney needs to speak to, what they're hearing is that we want to reduce taxes on the rich and deregulate again. that's what got us into trouble. you know, if they think that we are just going to repeat the things that brought us the terrible problems we had in 2007 and 2008, that's not going to resonate. i don't think that is his message and that's what's coming across. they need to focus on that and not whose poll is right. >> do you think that's the product of some tactical errors or the product of a broader shift in the balance of power within the coalition that is the republican party? >> i think it is part of the balance of power. there's a certain -- ats the extreme, there's a certain core that just wants to unseat this incumbent no matter what and they don't understand that you need to provide an alternative. people are not going to vote against somebody. they've been burned before. they want to know what mitt romney is going to do. mitt romney is going to help everybody, not just certain segments of the population. >> hasn't the problem been mitt romney is only speaking to the base? the denialism is their core. they didn't believe bill clinton was genuinely elected. we have to legislate voter fraud. the only reason democrats win is because of fraud. acorn somehow manipulated the electoral system to place this fraudulent foreigner into the white house. there's denialism about everything. i think they've built up a media that is willing to kater to the sort of sense of denialism and victimology. if you hermetically seal yourself into media, you can believe it's all a lie, right? >> i think we've seen this on the left. in 2004, it's not the polls before the election and the insistence afterwards. the voting machines were rigged. i think the left got past that. they didn't go into the 2008 campaign. >> and there were structures in place institutionally in which that was -- again, there's a human instinct there. the question is are the structures in place institutionally there that people that pursue that line will profit greatly? is there an incentive to pursue that such that you can get a huge check, huge prom negligence or actually get elevated. that i think is a big question. >> i think the nice thing about this example is that we'll know in six weeks. the election will be over and we'll know whether the polls were correct or not. i don't think the republicans are going to, you know, insist that the election was stolen. >> right. >> unless, you know, it's an outcome like florida, which i don't think is going to happen. so i think the party will have to get past this because they will have a reality check. it's not like climate change where you can deny the data and then you have to wait 100 years to figure out whether you were right or not. this one at least is just time limited. the thing that actually most reminds me of is this network of websites on the right insisting that the inflation statistics are rigged and that we've had 8 or 9% inflation for the last decade. that has also been disproved because if tharp true, we've been in a recession for ten years. >> that's right. >> people still believe that. >> one of the things that's really interesting that's happening now is, a, there's a debate happening among the right that is the debate that should be happening after election day, why mitt romney lost. it's happening right now. it's still a very close race. it's still a very winnable race for mitt romney, a. and, b, i think all of the big money is contributing to this. i want to talk about how that plays into this right after we take this break. droid does. and does it launch apps by voice while learning your voice ? 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i think actually we're seeing the effects of big money negatively on the republicans because this big money is pushing them towards messages that aren't that effective. >> i don't think this is principally about big money. i think this is a message that sells to the tea party base in the republican party which does not principally consist of people that are wealthy. it is small business people which is one of the most conservative demo