Looks like that massive blowout that the media has been trying to build up for Barry Obama will have to be put on hold. Latest CBS poll has Obama’s lead over John McCain down to 3 pts. among likely voters (a week ago it was 9.) And the new Reuters / C-SPAN / Zogby poll also has the race down to 3 pts. as well among likely voters. Both have it pegged at 48-45. Two major things happened in this timeframe — 1.) Sarah Palin had an outstanding debate performance and 2.) Sarah Palin has taken the gloves off and started to expose Obama for who and what he really is — a radical liberal. Now it is up to McCain to rock the house tonight at the second presidential debate.
UPDATE: Even the notoriously bad and biased Hotline now shows this to be a 2 pt. race.
UPDATE 2: Today’s Reuters / Zogby poll has the Obama lead down to 2 pts. as well now.
Filed under: 2008 Elections, John McCain, National Politics, Polls, Teleprompter Barry
And yet three tracking polls (Rasmussen, Gallup, and Hotline) along with two new national polls taken after the Veep date (CNN and NBC) show no gain for McCain at all.
It ain’t over yet, but I’m afraid the fat lady is warming up.
Gallup has it at 51-42 Obama, while Rasmussen has it at 52-44 Obama. And Obama has opened leads in just about every swing state.
It’s just not your year, Riley. The good news is that McCain probably won’t run for re-election in 2010, leaving another opportunity for Gilmore to thoroughly embarrass himself, if he wants to move west.
Well, GGFAC, there are 4 weeks until Election Day and the polls are all over the map — in part because they’re all doing different sampling methods. Some are oversampling Dem voters by as much as 10 percent.
If you bothered to educate yourself about the various polls’ internals, you’d realize that even the vaunted RCP average is unreliable this year because of the “garbage in, garbage out” process. They’re including way too many unreliable polls, such as Quinnipiac which in 1994 had Mario Cuomo winning reelection by 8 points the day before Election Day. By the way, he lost by about 3 or 4 percent.
That’s why you should ditch RCP for FiveThirtyEight.com, since they weight the pollsters’ numbers based on their accuracy. For example, the ridiculous Columbus Dispatch poll that was conducted via mail and showed Obama ahead in Ohio by seven receives only about 1/10 as much weight as the recent Rasmussen that show McCain up by one point.
Or you can hang your hat on a bad poll conducted fourteen years ago. See no evil…
Oh, puhleeze. FiveThirtyEight.com is known to be run by libs. Besides, it is still arbitrary to weight the polls the way they do and I wouldn’t trust it if it were a conservative or independent site that did the same thing.
The only way to gauge polls and how accurate they may be is to look at the internals, check out the party ID samples, number of likely voters, etc. Heck, one company could issue two polls, but use different methodologies that make one good and one crap.
To be sure, poor methodology alone can easily make a poll worthless. And FiveThirtyEight may be run by liberals, but Nate Silver was pretty spot on with his Baseball Prospectus site. But it’s pretty clear you’re looking for anything to discount the increasingly likelihood of a 300+ EV blowout.
I can’t say I blame you, though it’s not unlike Yankee fans proclaiming that everything would ultimately be OK during their summer collapse.
This is another one of those situations where both sides are touting the polls that make their guy look good, and ignoring the ones that make him look bad, while at the same time suggesting that the polls where their candidate isn’t performing so well are politically biased.
Ignore individual polls and day-to-day numbers and concentrate on the trends, however, and the direction of this election has been clear for the past three weeks now.