Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Gallup Sez: Our Poll Madness Is Out of Control

Obama 45%
McCain 43%

Yes, it's true. Gallup doesn't lie. The sky isn't falling. But no, we're not being raptured up to heaven either. Obama's still slightly ahead of McCain, even as he's going through a rough patch.

We'll survive. And if Obama & Democrats get back on the offense, we'll make it much easier for ourselves to win this fall. :-)

5 comments:

Mike Meyer said...

atdnext: One has to consider all the polls taken together. Even this one suggests it's a pretty gloomy day.

Thomas said...

Do not despair. Here's what the Daily Kos had to say about recent polls:

"I saw a couple people freaking out -- freaking out!!!! -- that McCain has the lead in some national polls.

So I sauntered over to Pollster.com to see what all the hoopla was about, and clicked through to their national polls page. Then I rolled my eyes when I saw that the poll causing such aneurysms was ....

A Zogby poll.

Some people are frackin' hopeless. Really. At the same time, a new Q-poll has Obama up five, Gallup has him up three (after being tied a couple of days ago), Ras has him up two, as does Bloomberg/Times.

Look, the race is tightening at the national level, but it's much less tight when you look at the state-by-state numbers that, you know, actually decide the presidency. So while it's not exactly a cakewalk, freaking out over single polls from shitty, discredited pollsters like Zogby is pretty pathetic.

We've got the veep announcements and the conventions to get through, and then the race will start in earnest. Be zen. Freaking out over crappy pollsters is just lame. Keep your eye on the composite -- Obama still leads that by 1.4 percent -- and maintain perspective -- McCain has never crossed the 45 percent threshold while Obama bobs between 45 and 50.

I'll be officially worried when McCain shows the ability to break that barrier of support. If he suddenly starts hovering in the upper 40s, then we might have trouble. But ultimately, this is a state-by-state battle. And in the electoral college fight, Obama still has a solid lead -- without even taking into account the ground machine Obama is building (pollsters aren't)"

Mike Meyer said...

You know, don't pay attention to Daily Kos's polling analysis. They totally blew 2004, and I promised I would never lie about the data again.

atdnext said...

DCDem-

I understand this is one poll. However, Zogby is also one poll... Actually, it's one really crappy poll! I wouldn't put much stock in them.

I didn't put this out to discredit you or Drew in any way. I'm only saying that we don't need to be depressed when McCain still can't take the lead. Has the race tightened since July? Yes. But has he taken the lead? Other than RCP, he hasn't.

So while I rarely ever agree with Markos on this kind of stuff, I do think we should wait until after the convention to see whether we're in for a win or we need to start making plans to move to Canada in 2009. ;-)

Anonymous said...

It's not madness. I'm not freaking out. And I'm not depressed. The point that I am making is that we can't assume that we have this election in the bag.

And BTW, a 2pt lead within the margin of error shouldn't comfort anyone!

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