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"This week's mainstream coverage of the presidential horse-race has been dominated by a series of polls showing the McCain-Palin ticket with its first stable lead over Obama and Biden. Gallup's tracking poll, USA Today and CBS News all show the Republicans with some kind of lead over the Democratic ticket. But, interestingly, all three polls were also conducted using a higher sampling of Republican voters than in July, raising a question of methodology."
at the same time democrats are outregistering republicans by far. Are the polls really accurate?
"This week's mainstream coverage of the presidential horse-race has been dominated by a series of polls showing the McCain-Palin ticket with its first stable lead over Obama and Biden. Gallup's tracking poll, USA Today and CBS News all show the Republicans with some kind of lead over the Democratic ticket. But, interestingly, all three polls were also conducted using a higher sampling of Republican voters than in July, raising a question of methodology."
at the same time democrats are outregistering republicans by far. Are the polls really accurate?
I don't think any of the polls are particularly accurate, I try to ignore the polls.
They probably are accurate. Consider the source of the article. Arianna Huffington's little mag is very skewed. She will say anything to give Democrats the momentum. Too bad for the Dems that few pay attention to her.
I'm not arguing the accuracy of the report, just the way it's presented.
dunno. I'm torn by them. I only think they are reliable if several of them over a large period of time predict one way or another. For instance. I think Obama has had a slight lead for quite a while. Time will tell if McCain will have one.
If they are using a higher sampling of republicans, than that would explain in part McCain's lead over Obama....but I agree its about the electoral college.
It may be that Christian fundamentalists who previously were not too excited about McCain did not bother to answer pollsters on the phone, but now that they have Palin to root for, they have come out to voice their support. But these fundies would not have voted for Obama regardless, so I don't think he really lost anything here. Don't forget too that the GOP convention came after the Dem convention, so these polls would obviously reflect the GOP bounce.
Its the Huffington Post. She is trying to hold a sinking ship up....she will get desperate. Gallup doesnt post how many Republicans vs. Democrats they poll, so any of that information she "supposedly" has is likely made up.
There are polls with slight Republican bias. There are other polls with slight Democrat bias. Some polls oversample Republicans. Others oversample Democrats. Some oversample independents. There are polls that don't have any bias. The truth, then, will lie somewhere in the middle.
If you want to cancel out all the biases and errors from the polls, the best thing to do, then, is to take a rolling average of all polls taken, which RealClearPolitics does.
If that's all McCain got from his convention, then that's a rather weak bounce than usually happens.
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