I find the hand-waving around the Maryland and Utah graphs to be great examples of the their motivated reasoning, and total blindness to the effect of conscious

I find the hand-waving around the Maryland and Utah graphs to be great examples of the their motivated reasoning, and total blindness to the effect of conscious campaigning. (Appropriately, 'campaign' is another word missing from their 38 pages.) Romney easily won Maryland's 2012 primary – 49% overall, presumably with the 'big precinct' advantage they find suspicious. (But, the researchers don't show us that graph or include any Maryland data in their tables.) But because the Maryland-2008 graph is 'flat' for the "same candidate… same state… same type of election", we are to believe all non-fraud density-driven vote-share effects are refuted. But 2008 was a wildly different election! Other candidates were contending on the same axes of fundraising, organization, and compromise/moderation that Romney dominated in 2012. Another candidate (McCain) won the overall nomination, but looking at the Maryland graph, it appears both Romney and McCain barely even contested Maryland: both finished at about 6%, less than 1/5th the winner. Do they show us McCain's or Obama's or Kerry's or Gore's or Dole's or Perot's or Clinton's slopes in any state or election? No. They just pick one small, relatively urban, and electorally irrelevant (for Republicans) state, Maryland, in one year, 2008, and imply its flatness means something. The same problem applies to their choice of Utah-2012 as another flatness example: Romney won with 93%! No one else spent a cent there! How does that reflect anything about the effects of density and campaign expenditures in actively-contested races? This kind of cherry-picking of outliers makes their case, especially with regard to the density-issue, look extra-flimsy.