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A 6,000-year Dales story of ritual and cannibalism... Bone finds in Yorkshire caves finally throw light on stone age life after breakthrough in radio-carbon dating. Sally CopeFarmer Tom Lord pictured at the entrance to the caves in Giggleswick THEY roamed the earth almost 6,000 years ago, performing rituals on animal remains and devouring human body parts. But these are not the strange creatures of film or fiction – they were farmers in the Yorkshire Dales. New research on bones discovered in six Dales caves has revealed that farming in the area dates back thousands of years – and with it...

Zogby now has the race back to a tie. It is very difficult, within a multi-day tracking poll, to come up with individual day samples that result in a spike one way and a return spike the very next day.

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Debating The Impact The fable of the first Presidential debate is well known. Richard Nixon was known as highly intelligent, determined, and both experienced and skilled in the art of debate. His opponent, the young and dynamic John F. Kennedy, understood the medium better. Nixon showed up weary, and foolishly did not use makeup. Kennedy was tanned and rested, and had his presentation professionally attended. The cameras made Kennedy look even better, while the sweating and pale Nixon came across sickly and nervous. According to the fable, those who heard...

UPDATE: Poll-watcher supreme Jerry Dales e-mails in with a slightly different take: I would like to respond to your two sentences, "The race is tightening. Kerry's not in such bad shape." Is the race tightening? You use as evidence the fact that the last several nationwide polls have shown the race being relatively close. But that is only part of the story. Tightening is a description of movement, and merely looking at the current location does not tell us anything about the movement. We have to look at the previous result as well to get that. So let's take a...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Turnout Model The Republican convention is over, and polls are coming out showing very different pictures of the Bush bounce. Time Magazine has the President up by 10. Newsweek did that one better, having him up by 11. Rasmussen has him up by 2, although he says if one outlying day's sample is factored out it becomes a four point lead. Gallup splits the difference, having Bush leading by seven points. Rasmussen was concerned enough at the reaction to his firm's different result that he wrote an explanation. The crux...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll The Vanishing Approval Gap I got one right, now I have to go for the other. Back when John Kerry chose John Edwards to be his running mate, I wrote an article in which I predicted a 4-7 point bounce for Kerry. Now it is time for the Republican convention, and the national polls and the state polls are both showing a race that is too close to call at this point due to Kerry's bounce fading away. In the past, there has been one measure which has been phenomenal...

Just Peeked in on Daly's "Daly Thoughts" On his chart he lists Kerry at 215 and Bush at 178. However He has Bush up in Ohio (by three points) and can't bring himself to move it to Bush's colum (It's still in Kerry's!), and he has MO, as a "toss up" and Bush leads there as well. The actual poll is (when added in using real math) Bush 209, Kerry 205, and there are twice as many Strong Bush states to Strong Kerry states. He is having a hard time to make it look good for Kerry. http://www.dalythoughts.com/ecb.htm Trade Sports...

<p>Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly recently wrote an intruiging piece that argues that when the media reports a poll as showing a statistical tie, this is not necessarily the case.</p> <p>In fact, what we're really interested in is the probability that the difference is greater than zero — in other words, that one candidate is genuinely ahead of the other. But this probability isn't a cutoff, it's a continuum: the bigger the lead, the more likely that someone is ahead and that the result isn't just a polling fluke. So instead of lazily reporting any result within the MOE as a "tie," which is statistically wrong anyway, it would be more informative to just go ahead and tell us how probable it is that a candidate is really ahead.</p>

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Panic Time? The first convention ended. The second, approaching. Individual state polls agreed that the challenger was in a commanding position. Key battleground states such as Oregon, Missouri, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Florida, New Hampshire, and Iowa were all polling very well for him. To a lesser degree, so were West Virginia, Maine, and Arkansas. Washington was in his ledger. So was Michigan, and Ohio, and Minnesota. An extremely dire set of circumstances, indeed. By the ECB scorecard, the challenger had over 300 electoral votes heading his way. His opponent, despite...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll The Kerry/Edwards Bounce Redux Every week, Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress pens a column titled "Public Opinion Watch". His latest effort focuses in on the polls released following the Democratic National Convention. Mr. Teixeira examines several polls and concludes "arguably, Kerry got a substantial bounce where he needed it most". He begins well, by rightly chastising Newsweek for rushing out a poll to measure Kerry's convention bounce without waiting until after Kerry's speech to begin their polling. That was shoddy journalism, presumably done merely to try to...

Current status: Kerry 224 Bush 187

The Democratic National Convention is underway, but it will be a little bit before we get any state polls that would reflect any bounce for Kerry and Edwards reflective of the impact of the events. However, it has been a few weeks since Senator Kerry named Senator Edwards as his running mate, and there have been a number of polls released since then that allow us to get a feel for how the race has changed on the state level since then. With the exception of West Virginia, Maine, Tennessee, Colorado, and Washington, every state that had an Electoral College...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Approval Gap A new phrase is about to become prevalent in the election year lexicon; "The Approval Gap" is simply the difference in support the President gets in the election match-up ("horserace") question in polls, and his job approval rating. Republican pollster Fabrizio, McLaughlin, and Associates did a (very flawed, due to an unacceptably small sample size) analysis of Approval Gap voters. Rasmussen will be doing a more comprehensive one within a few days. Before these pollsters had picked up on the theme, and before the phrase "Approval Gap" had...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll 24 States Throughout the months of May and June, the Rasmussen daily Presidential tracking poll showed a remarkably stable race. Neither candidate ever went ahead by very much, and always came right back to the other. The race has been a deadlock, as day after day of the tracking poll showed. In some quarters, the stability of these polling numbers became a bit of a running gag, with Mickey Kaus quipping more than once, "nothing moves Rasmussen's robots". John F. Kerry had a few more better days in May according...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Bounce! In July 1976, the polls were showing President Ford in all sorts of trouble against his challenger, a peanut farmer from Georgia with an oversized smile and a number of fawning profiles in the major news magazines. The Gallup poll showed him trailing Mr. Carter by 13 points, then by 18 points, then by 17 points. His support level in the horserace question had fallen to the mid-30s, with his opponent consistently coming in comfortably above 50%.And the worst had yet to come, as the Democratic Convention took place...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Yeah, But... Ed Goeas is a Republican pollster with The Tarrance Group. Celinda Lake is a Democrat pollster with Lake, Snell, Perry & Associates. In election years, they collaborate on the Battleground Poll, which is now sponsored by George Washington University. The Battleground Poll is my personal favorite. In 1992 and 1996, it was the most accurate poll on the Presidential election. In 2000, they had a bit of an off year, coming up 3.5 points off-- still well within the margin of error (and since tracking polls that continued...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Issues Let's look at some recent polls that asked issue questions beyond the horserace question. There have been three that I have chosen due to them being relatively similar in timeframe and having many similarly worded questions. Horserace Poll Date Universe Bush Kerry ABC News / Washington Post 6/17-20 1,105 RV for Horserace, 600 adults for issues 44 48 Time / CNN / Harris Interactive 6/12-13 563 RV for Horserace, 1,001 adults for issues 49 42 Fox News / Opinion Dynamics 6/8-9 900 RV 42 42 I think it is...

<p>A few weeks back, I wrote about what can be gleaned by comparing Apples to Apples. This week, I will be comparing apples to oranges-- how different polling companies involved in multiple states match up. I began writing this article on Sunday, so the data I am using is from before then. For each company examined, I will show their most recent numbers in any state that another multi-state polling company has released numbers. For this, I have limited the information to those polls conducted since Kerry became the Democrat's nominee. Since that time, while there has been some apparent movement in some states, overall the race has been remarkably stable, which should minimize distortions in this view caused by different polling dates. The companies I will be looking at are Rasmussen, Zogby, SurveyUSA, Research2000, Mason-Dixon, Quinnipiac, and American Research Group.</p>

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Travels The Presidential campaign has settled down a bit into the post-primary doldrums where certain equilibrium takes hold and rapid swings in public opinion do not happen without the impact of a major news event. Certainly, with the economy recovering, with the nation on constant pins and needles over possible terrorist attacks, and especially with our fighting forces in harm's way in Iraq, such news never seems to be out of the question. Life in 2004 has a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop-- a feeling that...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Breaking Conventional Wisdom Democrats are feeling pretty good about their chances in the Presidential election, and not without reason. Bush's approval ratings have famously descended to the low 40s, and as Susan Estrich and various other Democrats have been gleefully pointing out, no incumbent since the advent of polling has been re-elected with approval numbers this low, this late. Pollster John Zogby has declared that the race is Kerry's to lose. James Carville has written that it is over. Dick Morris suggests that Bush is in serious, serious trouble. Sure...

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Same As It Ever Was A lot has been made about the division between Red and Blue states. John Edwards ran his primary campaign around the concept of "two Americas". At times it seems as if Americans are locked into some sort of dysfunctional marriage badly in need of a John Gray book- "Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus". From Michael Moore and Al Franken to Ann Coulter it certainly can seem as if partisanship is at an all-time high. But it is not. Partisanship was with our...

<p>Apples to apples, funk to funky, you know that we're all poll junkies...</p> <p>My recent articles have touched on the hunt for the likely voter, how elusive a hunt it can be, and how different companies use different methods to try to predict who they are. A major challenge in trying to weigh several polling results across different polling firms is that the methods can be so different that differences in the results can be not merely due to the random fluctuations that occur invariably a part of sampling, and not merely due to any underlying movement in voter sentiment, but also due to the different techniques used in accumulating and presenting the data. While I have confidence in my ability to weigh these factors, it is still a worthwhile exercise to occasionally compare apples only to apples, and look only at multiple results by the same outfit.</p>

I Wouldn't Touch It With a 10 Foot Poll Likely Story Are you a likely voter? Before you answer that question, I want you to notice that I did not ask if you are likely to vote. These are two very different questions. How likely you are to vote is something you can answer on your own, and only you know how accurate an answer it is. But are you a likely voter? To answer this, you would have to know how the designation is defined. And that depends on who is doing the asking. Different polling companies use...

<p>I have a weakness for Jimmy Stewart movies. Sit me down in front of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" and I am a very happy camper. Every Christmas, I am the sentimental sap who does not run screaming at TBS's eight millionth airing of "It's a Wonderful Life". And as a budding conservative, while growing up I loved the idealism and triumph of old-fashioned patriotism and virtue over abusive government and corruption in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington".</p>

<p>Two months ago, I kicked off the Electoral College Breakdown for 2004 when it had become clear that John F. Kerry was going to be the nominee of the Democrats. Nearly $100M in advertising later, what has happened to the race? Most people, if you asked them, would say that Kerry had been winning the race until lately, when the President had made a comeback and has now surged into the lead; they would hold this opinion because that is pretty much what the national polls have been showing.</p>

<p>The best national poll for my money is the Battleground Poll. Produced by a joint effort between Democrat pollster Celinda Lake of Snell, Lake, Perry and Associates, and Republican pollster Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group, it avoids the partisanship that sometimes can slip into the sampling methods of other polls. The partisanship can come out in the strategic analysis each does for the respective parties, although the spin presented is usually substantive. This year's springtime Battleground Poll, released this week, is excellent as always.</p>

<p>I conclude my review of the April 2000 Electoral College Breakdown by examining the tossup states. One of the most frequent criticisms I have received while doing the ECB is over my decision to not use the "Slight Advantage" states in calculating each candidate's total. Indeed, as a nod to the fact that people were going to take my numbers and add these states to the candidate having the slight advantage anyway, I have started to include the totals "with tossups", although I give these totals less prominence.</p>

<p>Are Things Leaning Towards Staying The Same?</p> <p>In retrospect, it is pretty obvious that Oregon and New Mexico would eventually become tight contests in 2000 despite April polls showing George W. Bush with double digit leads over Al Gore. In 1996, President Clinton defeated Bob Dole in Oregon 47.15% to 39.06%, with Ross Perot taking in 8.80%. And in New Mexico, Clinton had topped Dole by almost as comfortable of a margin, 49.18% to 41.86%, with Perot scoring 5.80%. What caught my eye, however, was how similar the vote percentage for the Democrat candidate was in each case.</p>

<p>The election cycle is in full gear. The candidates have been chosen. Unless the Democrats decide to bring some conspiracy theories to life, George W. Bush will defend his Presidency against Senator John Kerry. The polls are coming in, and they are painting a picture that meshes with the conventional wisdom- that 2004 will be 2000 redux.</p>

<p>The designations in the ECB2004 are based most significantly on the most recently available poll(s). In the past, I relied strictly on the polls, using my judgement only when there were two competing polls released during the same timeframe. In such cases, I would use my experience in watching opinion polls to give more credence to the poll run by the company or organization with the best reputation and the best methodology. However, while this removed almost all potential bias from my tracking, it allowed unfettered the bias of selectively released polls; if a poll was released by a group, and no other poll for that state was released in that timeframe, by default I would change the designation based upon that poll. Seeing how campaigns run many more polls than are released, and if one runs many polls eventually one will get a surprising result (an 'outlier', or a poll outside of the margin of error), the result was that campaigns would release the polls that would spin the race the way they want and instead of the ECB providing the most accurate picture, it could occasionally paint a distorted one.</p>

<p>This past week, "The Hill" ran an article by a Dr. David Hill titled "Is the election already over?" Rarely have I found a published piece of poll analysis that was so wrong on so many levels. That it was written by a director of a polling firm, and a Republican polling firm at that, left me scratching my head. Surely a professional could not be so falacious without intention.</p>

<p>Right now, most nationwide polls show a very tight race between President Bush and Senator Kerry. The media loves a horse race because it sells copies and drives ratings; the media is in full feeding frenzy mode right now over the sagging poll numbers for Bush and the soaring ratings for Kerry. There are two problems with this conventional wisdom. First, the movement of the polls that we are seeing now is nothing unusual. Second, winning electoral votes on the state level elects Presidents. A race that is close in either popular vote or in electoral vote may not be close in the other. Despite these caveats, there are some interesting numbers in recent polls that point to some of the problems facing President Bush.</p>

<p>This week was a pretty quiet one on the ECB front. The number of polls released this week was small, and most either reinforced previous results or represented very small changes. The one piece of significant movement from previous polling opens the door to the possibility of this election being a two front war, a possibility that demonstrates some vulnerability for the Bush/Cheney re-elect effort.</p>

<p>Since I began the rundown of the states, California had a new poll released.</p> <p>Please, no comments on the colors regarding who is red and who is blue. The map was made for me by SC Swamp Fox using a tool online, and they chose the colors for him. I'll eventually be doing my own map. Also, please note that although I call some states as having a slight advantage one way or another, it would be a mistake to count them for either candidate. They are well within the margin of error, and should be considered anyone's game.</p>

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this tenth installment, the remaining states: Tennessee, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and the great state of Texas.</p>

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this ninth installment, the random state generator presented me with Iowa, Arkansas, Minnesota, Louisiana, and Illinois.</p>

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this seventh installment, the random state generator presented me with Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Nebraska, and West Virginia.</p>

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this sixth installment, the random state generator presented me with Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Mississippi.</p>

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this fourth installment, the random state generator presented me with Wyoming, Delaware, Utah, Virginia, and New York.</p>

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this eighth installment, the random state generator presented me with Indiana, Arizona, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Connecticut.</p>

Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this fourth installment, the random state generator presented me with Kentucky, Michigan, Rhode Island, Idaho, and Alaska. Kentucky Electoral Votes: 8 2000 Result Bush 57% Gore 41% Background: Johnson, Carter (first time) and Clinton (twice) carried the Bluegrass state. Nixon (twice), Reagan...

Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this second installment, the random state generator presented me with Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, Montana, Massachusetts. Please note that while this batch of states was pretty "Bush friendly", the grouping was determined completely at random using a random number generator. Colorado Electoral...

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For this third installment, the random state generator presented me with Nevada, Missouri, California, South Carolina, and Florida.</p>

<p>Due to popular demand, I am going to revive my poll tracking and analysis that I did during the 2000 election season. I will be starting things a bit differently this year. Instead of starting off with a comprehensive overview of the entire nation, I am going to start by looking at five states at a time. For the first installment, the random state generator presented me with North Dakota, Maine, Alabama, New Mexico, and Vermont.</p>