Only in Florida: Nudist Colony Wants Clothing Optional Polling Site

Need I say more?

Story here.

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Gallup says Obama Up by 8 Points in Likely Voters

This is a wild turn around from 2 days ago when Gallup said they were tied. This author can't believe the wide swings in polling results. Obviously polling is not true science, but rather voodoo science.

Being within 8 points of the correct answer in a 2 person race is not anywhere at all acceptable. Statistical methods are supposed to control for raw data aberrations. 8, 10, and 15 point swings are simply not tolerable.

Course it's similar to predictions as to who will be the #1 team in March Madness (referring to a college basketball tournament here in the US for all of our overseas readers). That's why we play the game.

Gallup says 2 points, Rassmussen says 3: Maybe this is Still a Horse Race!

The Drudge Report is reporting that Gallup says that Obama only leads McCain 49-47 of likely voters and that Rassmussen says that it is only a 3 point spread.

But the Pew Center shows that Obama has a 15 point lead

The Washington Post addresses the question of whether the polls are accurate:

"Could the polls be wrong?

Sen. John McCain and his allies say that they are. The country, they say, could be headed to a 2008 version of the famous 1948 upset election, with McCain in the role of Harry S. Truman and Sen. Barack Obama as Thomas E. Dewey, lulled into overconfidence by inaccurate polls.

"We believe it is a very close race, and something that is frankly very winnable," Sarah Simmons, director of strategy for the McCain campaign, said yesterday.

Few analysts outside the McCain campaign appear to share this view. ...

Still, there appears to be an undercurrent of worry among some polling professionals and academics. One reason is the wide variation in Obama leads: Just yesterday, an array of polls showed the Democrat leading by as little as two points and as much as 15 points. The latest Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll showed the race holding steady, with Obama enjoying a lead of 52 percent to 45 percent among likely voters.

Some in the McCain camp also argue that the polls showing the largest leads for Obama mistakenly assume that turnout among young voters and African Americans will be disproportionately high. The campaign is banking on a good turnout among GOP partisans, whom McCain officials say they are working hard to attract to the polls.

"I have been wondering for weeks" whether the polls are accurately gauging the state of the race, said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. Borrowing from lingo popularized by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Schier asked what are the "unknown unknowns" about polling this year: For instance, is the sizable cohort of people who don't respond to pollsters more Republican-leaning this year, perhaps because they don't want to admit to a pollster that they are not supporting the "voguish" Obama?

If so, that could mean the polls are routinely understating McCain's support. ...
...

"As other public polls begin to show Senator Obama dropping below 50% and the margin over McCain beginning to approach margin of error with a week left, all signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday," McCain pollster Bill McInturff wrote in a memo released last night by the campaign. Obama officials voiced confidence in their ultimate victory but said they have always expected the election to be close.

To buttress its point of view, the McCain team points to results reported yesterday by the Gallup organization, whose daily tracking poll showed Obama up 49 percent to 47 percent using Gallup's traditional turnout model, which assumes that turnout will follow the patterns of past elections. Obama has a larger lead, seven points, using a model that allows a higher presence of first-time voters."

Read the whole story here.

Zogby Poll: Obama by 49% McCain 46%

Just when I think that McCain is dead, the polls swing back. Today, the Zogby Poll shows McCain within 3%, 49% - 46%

Here is what John Zogby said in his analysis:

“There is no question that this race continues to tighten and that McCain is finding his message again,” said Pollster John Zogby. “It is after all about the economy and that is how McCain tightened it up the last time. I have said over and over again, when he focuses on extraneous issues, he screws up. In today's single day of polling, it was 49% to 46% in favor of Obama. McCain has moved his own numbers each of the three days and Obama has gone down from 54% to 50% to 49%. I have alluded before to this strange, magnetic pull that brings Obama down to 48% or 49%, a danger zone for him. McCain's gains are among white voters, where he now leads by 12 points, and with men, where he again has a healthy lead. There is still a lot of campaign to go. A lot of campaign to go.”

But the polls vary widely. RCP has Obama with a 7.6% lead, while TIPP/IBD shows that McCain only trails by 2.2%

IBD/TIPP POLL: Obama Only Leads McCain by 1.1%

IBD summary results here.

"Posted: Thursday, October 23, 2008

McCain has cut into Obama's lead for a second day and is now just 1.1 points behind. The spread was 3.7 Wednesday and 6.0 Tuesday. The Republican is making headway with middle- and working- class voters, and has surged 10 points in two days among those earning between $30,000 and $75,000. He has also gone from an 11-point deficit to a 9-point lead among Catholics."

What is Going on? Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll: Obama by a Landslide. AP Poll: They're Tied!!

What is going on with this election? A Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll says that Obama will win by a landslide 51.6% to 42%.

But as reported by the Drudge Report, there is an AP poll that says they're tied 44%-43%.

The Investors Business Daily says:

Contrary to other polls, some of which show Obama ahead by double digits, the IBD/TIPP Poll shows a sudden tightening of Obama's lead to 3.7 from 6.0. McCain has picked up 3 points in the West and with independents, married women and those with some college. He's also gaining momentum in the suburbs, where he's gone from dead even a week ago to a 20-point lead. Obama padded gains in urban areas and with lower-class households, but he slipped 4 points with parents.

The Wall Street Journal has a great article on why polls might be incorrect here. In part they say:

[T]he exit polls in almost all the primaries this year showed Mr. Obama doing better than he actually did. The same respondent bias -- the greater willingness of Obama voters to be polled -- which apparently occurred on primary days could also occur in the exit poll on Election Day, and in the phone polls of early and absentee voters that Edison/Mitofsky will conduct to supplement it.


Under the WSJ theory, Obama supporters are very excited to be polled and declare their support for him, while McCain supporters don't want to be bothered with answering a pollster's questions on the phone in the evening. (I certainly understand. I have turned down survey people most of the time when they call.)

The Financial Times of London offers this explanation for the difference in polls:

For a poll to be useful, its sample must match as closely as possible the demographic make-up of the voting population. This year, however, the traditional rules have been thrown into confusion by Mr Obama’s efforts to mobilise two groups that have been under-represented in previous elections: young people and African-Americans.

An aggressive registration drive by the Obama campaign and its allies has added millions to the electoral roll, but it remains uncertain how many will take part in the election.

Those polls giving Mr Obama his biggest lead, such as the CBS/New York Times polls that have shown him with a 13-14 point margin over the past two weeks, tend to be based on the most generous assumptions of higher Democratic turnout.

Polls that depict a tighter race, such as Reuters/Zogby and Rasmussen, which have consistently put Mr Obama’s lead in the low to mid-single digits, tend to be based on more conservative models that assume less change from previous elections.

Gallup, one of the most respected pollsters, has acknowledged the uncertainty by offering two separate estimates of likely voters in its daily tracking poll.

One takes into account past voting behaviour; the other uses estimates of an “expanded” turnout, so adding to Mr Obama’s lead.

One thing is sure. Polls don't decide who wins an election, voters do. That's why they play the game! Get out and vote.

Get Out and Vote; Because These People Will Vote - Perhaps Many Times if ACORN Gets Their Wish

Get out and vote. Dont't let the polls convince you that your vote doesn't mean anything.



Because if ACORN has its way, these people will vote in your place.

All Those Who Have Won The Presidential Election, Please Step Forward... Errr, Obama, Not So Fast.

Zogby Poll: McCain Pulls within 2.7% of Obama

Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll: Obama 47.8%, McCain 45.1%

Zogby states:

"McCain now trails Obama by 2.7 points, down from the 3.9 point deficit he faced 24 hours earlier.

Seven-point-one percent of the likely voters surveyed said they remain undecided.

Obama lost five-tenths of a point from yesterday's report, while McCain gained another six-tenths of a point. It was the third consecutive day in which Obama's numbers slipped and McCain's numbers increased."

Whoa!!!!!! I thought the election was over. I thought Obama was picking his cabinet already. The main stream media has already crowned him. Europe is ready for the coronation.

But the American people are not so sure.

Others are now noticing that Obama's ship may have a leak. The Financial Times of London ran a commentary called: Will a funny thing happen on the way to Washington?

Reuters says that there are "Red Flags" being raised because of Obama's sinking lead.

Ann Coulter: Polls Since 1976 Always Wrongly Favored Democratic Candidate in Last Month of Election

Could polls be skewed to convince the American public that one candidate will surely win (so therefore all of you for the other candidate might as well stay home)?

Well you may remember the suspicious election day exit poll of the last election that said that Kerry was going to win Ohio big and therefore the entire race. It was "accidentally released" mid day. The effect might have been to keep Bush supporters home. In fact, Bush won Ohio, significantly, and therefore the race. The poll was dead wrong.

Ann Coulter has discovered the pattern has been consistent since 1976 - in favor of the Democratic candidate. In my opinion, it smells like the same thing is happening this year. The polls said that Biden beat Palin, yet the debate was the most watched VP debate ever, and had 7 million more viewers than the presidential debates. After the last debate, the NYT said that Obama was ahead by 10 points, but Gallup and Rassmussen said it was only 3 and 4 points. That's a huge - read statistically significant - difference.

One way it is done is by the underlying assumptions. Most polls assume that there is a ratio in America of Democrats to Republicans which is something like 3:2. Therefore when they get the raw data, if they have more Republicans answer than a 3:2 ratio to Democrats, they adjust the Republic opinions to make them a smaller factor in the poll.

But in this election season (read the spring primaries) was there a reason for so many more Democrats registering to vote than Republicans? Sure, Obama v. Clinton on the Dems side and McCain versus nobody on the Republican side. I didn't even vote in my primary - I was out of town and didn't get an absentee ballot. But I am interested in the general election.

The other big difference is between registered voters and "likely" voters. Republicans, conservatives, and middle aged people are more likely to vote than Democrats, liberals, and young. This isn't an insult, it is just a fact. This will effect who will win an election. Go to a college cafeteria and take a poll and you're going to get a vast majority of Democratic Obama supporters. Take a poll at the factory, or in the office and you're going to find more Republican McCain supporters. But the percentage of people who will actually vote is higher in the factory or office than in the college cafeteria.

Here are some of Ann Coulter's findings:

"Reviewing the polls printed in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the last month of every presidential election since 1976, I found the polls were never wrong in a friendly way to Republicans. When the polls were wrong, which was often, they overestimated support for the Democrat, usually by about 6 to 10 points.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter narrowly beat Gerald Ford 50.1 percent to 48 percent. And yet, on Sept. 1, Carter led Ford by 15 points. Just weeks before the election, on Oct. 16, 1976, Carter led Ford in the Gallup Poll by 6 percentage points -- down from his 33-point Gallup Poll lead in August.

Reading newspaper coverage of presidential elections in 1980 and 1984, I found myself paralyzed by the fear that Reagan was going to lose.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan beat Carter by nearly 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent. In a Gallup Poll released days before the election on Oct. 27, it was Carter who led Reagan 45 percent to 42 percent.

In 1984, Reagan walloped Walter Mondale 58.8 percent to 40 percent, -- the largest electoral landslide in U.S. history. But on Oct. 15, The New York Daily News published a poll showing Mondale with only a 4-point deficit to Reagan, 45 percent to 41 percent. A Harris Poll about the same time showed Reagan with only a 9-point lead. The Oct. 19 New York Times/CBS News Poll had Mr. Reagan ahead of Mondale by 13 points. All these polls underestimated Reagan's actual margin of victory by 6 to 15 points.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis by a whopping 53.4 percent to 45.6 percent. A New York Times/CBS News Poll on Oct. 5 had Bush leading the Greek homunculus by a statistically insignificant 2 points -- 45 percent to 43 percent. (For the kids out there: Before it became a clearinghouse for anti-Bush conspiracy theories, CBS News was considered a credible journalistic entity.)

A week later -- or one tank ride later, depending on who's telling the story -- on Oct. 13, Bush was leading Dukakis in The New York Times Poll by a mere 5 points.

Admittedly, a 3- to 6-point error is not as crazily wrong as the 6- to 15-point error in 1984. But it's striking that even small "margin of error" mistakes never seem to benefit Republicans.

In 1992, Bill Clinton beat the first President Bush 43 percent to 37.7 percent. (Ross Perot got 18.9 percent of Bush's voters that year.) On Oct. 18, a Newsweek Poll had Clinton winning 46 percent to 31 percent, and a CBS News Poll showed Clinton winning 47 percent to 35 percent.

So in 1992, the polls had Clinton 12 to 15 points ahead, but he won by only 5.3 points.

In 1996, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole 49 percent to 40 percent. And yet on Oct. 22, 1996, The New York Times/CBS News Poll showed Clinton leading by a massive 22 points, 55 percent to 33 percent.

In 2000, which I seem to recall as being fairly close, the October polls accurately described the election as a virtual tie, with either Bush or Al Gore 1 or 2 points ahead in various polls. But in one of the latest polls to give either candidate a clear advantage, The New York Times/CBS News Poll on Oct. 3, 2000, showed Gore winning by 45 percent to 39 percent. "

Read the entire article here.

This discrepancy could be in play again this year with some polls saying that there is only a 3 point difference while other polls say 10 point. And some major media is saying the Dems will have a super majority in Congress. I don't know what the truth is. The economic crisis on Wall Street is not going to help the Republicans but then again, 18 days is a long time in American politics.

OMG: McCain Pulls Within 3 Pts of Obama: Gallup Obama 49% McCain 46%

Drudge Report is reporting that Gallup says amongst likely voters McCain has pulled within 3 points of Obama. Most polls are of registered voters but polls of likely voters is generally a more accurate reflection of how the election might turn out.

Rassmussen reports that there is only a 4 point spread between the candidates.

What?? Zogby Poll: McCain Within 2% of Obama

Zogby: Obama 47% McCain 45%

It's a race again.

CBS Poll: Race Has Tightened Again After VP Debate

Sarah Palin pulls one out again as a new CBS poll shows McCain-Palin pulls within 4 points 47% - 43% amongst registered voters. Before the VP debate, Obama led McCain by 9 points. So I guess all that baloney about polls showing that people thought Biden did better than Palin at the debate was fabricated by the main stream media.

McCain still has an uphill battle as he gave up the lead he had by hiding Palin after she accepted the nomination. His task is also made difficult by the financial markets meltdown.

Does Poll Show Obama Will Lose Because of Race?

You probably have heard broadcasted from every media outlet that an AP-Yahoo poll found that racism may keep Obama from being elected President.

Racism, racism, racism. If Obama loses, we are supposed to believe that racism is the cause.

But if you dig deep into the poll you'll find that blacks are almost unanimously for Obama - which is a race bias that somewhat negates the alleged racism against Obama.

But if you dig even farther - you'll find something that almost no media outlet is reporting: that many more people doubt Obama's qualifications to be President than have concerns about his race:

"Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.

Three in 10 of those Democrats who don't trust Obama's change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain." Report here.

Now you've heard the rest of the story.

Obama Makes a Comeback in the Polls

Gallup says that Obama has taken a 48% - 44% lead among registered voters.

Rassmussen says that they are tied 48% - 48%

Rassmussen says that red and blue states will probably be the same as they have been the last 3 elections. In counting probable electoral votes, McCain has 227 votes to Obama's 212, with 270 needed for election. Fully 99 electoral votes in eight other states (CO, MI, NH, NV, OH, PA, VA, and WI) remained in the toss-up category. In fact, Ohio could determine the election again. Great state by state analysis here.

Big Ten States Poll

New Rassmussen Research: Since Abe Lincoln, only 3 Dem Presidents Have Won a Majority of Voters

Scott Rassmussen reports that:

Since 1860, the year that Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president, only three Democrats have won the White House with a majority of the popular vote. Each of the three—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter—were aided by extraordinary circumstances.
Roosevelt was elected during the depths of the Great Depression. Johnson was elected less than a year after he assumed the presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Carter was elected in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, a time that makes even the current challenges faced by the Republican Party seem tame by comparison.

For a while, it appeared to many that Barack Obama might be able to expand the traditional limits of Democratic appeal and break through the 50% ceiling. But despite all the polling done by Rasmussen Reports and others this season, he has not yet broken through that barrier.

Keep in mind that a person becomes the President of the US after winning a majority of the electoral college votes. That's the way our founding fathers set it up. But usually, winning the electoral college vote means you also won the majority vote. Read here and here about the electoral college.

Polls and Political Backers

Gallup Polls show McCain with a one point lead over Obama amongst registered voters 48%-47%.

In states critical to either party winning the election, Rassmussen says that McCain holds a 5 point lead in Florida, a 3 point lead in Ohio, and is now tied up in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

CNNPolitics.con reports that "Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and member of the Democratic National Committee’s Platform Committee, will endorse John McCain for president on Wednesday, her spokesman tells CNN."

"[S]he said of Obama in an interview with CNN’s Joe Johns. 'I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.'”