Most daily tracking polls on Monday morning are showing a 1 point decrease in Obama's lead. Drudge and others are hailing this as proof that McCain will come back and win. However, some things to consider.
1) Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com predicts a marginal tightening of the polls between now and the end of the election, so this is expected. Remember that Nate was the one who very accurately predicted the poll movement during and after the conventions. Nate's background is baseball statistics, by the way, and he stands out for having predicted before this season began that Tampa Bay, who had never come close to a .500 season, would have a breakout season this year. (Tampa Bay is now playing for the AL championship.) The guy knows numbers and forecasts. Nate is not worried about this slight poll movement -- and he points out that in the battleground states Obama's lead is consistently higher than in the national poll.
2) The poll numbers are now back where they were the middle of last week. Obama may have experienced an artificial, temporary bounce due to the debate and the disasterous economic news.
All in all, not to worry. Obama will likely get another debate boost on Wednesday.
Posted by Anonny at October 13, 2008 06:58 AMas long as McOld has an (R) after his name it won't tighten enough.
Posted by T2 at October 13, 2008 07:31 AMIt seems like the GOP was in a twitter one day last week when all the tracking polls but one showed a gain for McCain. Then things went back to where they were. We will see a little bit of wandering in the tracking polls, but most voters have made their decision.
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at October 13, 2008 09:07 AMYep, all the excitement this morning about the "trend toward McCain" was stifled when Gallup came out with their three day tracker -- moving Obama from +7 to +10 at 51-41. And their LV models didn't given McCain anything to hope for either.
People are voting now ... decisions are being made. Obama is over 50% in the battlegrounds already and likely to capture most of the undecideds.
Meanwhile, six-shooter McCain keeps trying the same old themes hoping to find one that will work. This morning the theme was experience. Tomorrow they'll be back to Ayers. Or ACORN. Or "he'll raise your taxes". Or whatever.
Posted by Anonny at October 13, 2008 10:45 AMAnonny, Gallup can sure be counted on to have random fluctuations day-to-day! Their 2 likely voter results are interesting. The first, giving McCain a 7 point lead, is based on intention and past voting. The latter, giving Obama a 10 point (53-43) lead, uses intention only. The thing is, newly registered voters are likely voters - about 75% end up voting. Some pollsters will capture those voters; some will not consider them likely.
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at October 13, 2008 11:06 AMInteresting. Twice in less than a month I've received some kind of absentee ballot request from those earnest workers with the Virginia Republican party along with the typical BS literature.
Greg Palast recommends voting in person Nov 4th and doing so early in the day.
Posted by valiberal at October 13, 2008 02:00 PM