Posted on 10/30/2008 9:50:54 PM PDT by Chet 99
As the date of the US election grows closer, opinion polls are showing Democratic candidate Barack Obama is still on track to become America's first black president.
Several new opinion polls are released each day - dozens each week.
But Republican nominee John McCain's campaign says its internal figures suggest that the result on election day may be much closer than the independent polls are suggesting.
At each of his campaign rallies, Senator McCain loves to mention that he is behind in the polls but that he is going to fool the pundits and pull off an upset win on election day. It is a line he repeated in an interview with Larry King.
"I know we're still the underdog. We're now two or three or four points down and we've got six days to go to make that up but it's not a matter of worry. You and I have been together long enough, you know, I love the underdog status. I just want to leave that status by the time the polls close," he said.
The opinion polls show that not only is he behind nationally, he is trailing Senator Obama in key battleground states, including those won by President George W Bush in 2004.
But there are so many polls it is hard to know which one to believe.
Karl Rove is a former adviser to Mr Bush, who is credited with orchestrating his two election victories. Even he cannot believe how many opinion polls are being released.
"We're all getting pollitis here. In the first 24 days of October this year, there have been 177 national polls. By comparison in 2004, during the first 24 days of October, there were 55. We've had 300 per cent more polls in 2008," he said.
Senator McCain's lead pollster, Bill McInturff, has released a memo saying that next week's election may easily be too close to call.
He writes "the McCain campaign has made impressive strides over the last weeks of tracking. The campaign is functionally tied across the battleground states, with our numbers improving sharply over the last four tracks".
Functionally tied, as Mr McInturff explains, "means as a pollster that you're within margin of error".
"If you're in two or three points it means that on any given day you're going to see some fluctuation variation. So one day we could be a point ahead, the next day you're two points down," Mr McInturff said.
"Functionally tied was my way as a pollster of saying that I believe that we are within margin of error across these incredibly important battleground states."
Mr McInturff also says his polling shows that about 8 per cent of voters are either undecided or will not tell the pollster who they will vote for.
"We did a special study where we looked at that 8 per cent and we looked at who they were," he said.
"Who they were are older voters who live in rural America who are somewhat downscale, not college graduates.
"In the past they tell us that in 2004 they voted for George Bush by a two to one margin. And given their partisan roots, given their Bush over Carey split ... I believe they're going to break very heavily towards John McCain and I think that's roughly an additional thee plus points that will shift to McCain as all the votes are counted."
"If you take a functionally tied race and you add three or four points as these people break, guess what? The race is tied."
Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies public opinion, says it is difficult to decipher the opinion polls.
"The polls have certainly proliferated. I sometimes wonder whether they're a little like paper money in Argentina; a currency with less value than they've had in the past because of the vast number of them," she said.
Some of the opinion polls are saying that Senator Obama has a very big lead over Senator McCain, up to double digits. Others are saying that his lead has narrowed to just a couple of points.
But Ms Bowman says while "there is some significant variation in the polls ... in some ways most of the major polls have actually been pretty stable".
"Recently in [pollster] Mark Blumenthal's compilation he argues that the Obama lead has narrowed ever so slightly in recent days, it's now at about 6.7 points in their overall estimate of the national trends," Ms Bowman said.
"And you see a little bit more movement in the Republican direction in some of the daily tracking polls, but still a picture of stability in some ways if you look at one individual poll and then compare it to that pollster's results a few days later."
Ms Bowman says she expects the gap between Senator Obama and Senator McCain to close, but the race is "Obama's to lose".
"I mean, certainly the McCain [camp] wants to suggest that we still have a race in order to get Republicans out to the polls but most of the other national polls, non-proprietary data, the kind that McCain's pollster's conducting, have it within a pretty similar range, again all suggesting an Obama lead," she said.
You couldn’t beg for a smokier gun. “Stay home; resistance is futile.”
"This surprisingly has had a huge suppressing movement in vote turnout issues. Next, we infiltrate all the blogs, and all the YouTube videos, and we overwhelm the voting, the comments, all to continue the appearance of overwhelming world support for Obama. People make posts to the effect that the world has gone mad. That's the intention, to make you feel stressed and crazy and feel like the world is ending. We have also had quite a hand in skewing many, many polls." I don't know how they've done that. She doesn't describe how they've skewed the polls. "Some we couldn't control as much as we would have liked, but many we have spoiled, just enough to make Real Clear Politics look scary to a McCain supporter. It's worked, although the goal was to appear 13 to 15 points ahead. You see, the results have been working. People tend to support a winner. Go with the flow, become sheeple. The polls are roughly three to five points in favor of Barack. That's due to our inflation of the polls and pulling in the sheeple. Our donors are the same people who finance the mainstream media. Their interests are tied. Barack then tends to come across as Teflon, nothing sticks, and trust me, there were meetings with Fox News, the goal was to blunt them as much as possible. Watch O'Reilly, he's become much more diplomatic and fair and balanced and soft towards Obama. It's because he wants to retain the number one spot on cable news and have access to the Obama campaign.
People still watch MTV...really...that is surprising.
I thought they mostly ran infomercials now?
Ehh...hopefully the people of Philly will be so ill from a week of debauchery that they do not vote neither early, nor often...
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Well, we have the Phillies streak....the only other time that they won the World Series, in 1980, Reagan beat Carter!
Not to suggest that McCain is Reagan...but Obama certainly bears scary resemblance to Jimmah.
Fear not Padre, many of the Obama voters in Philly are resting in peace, or being bused in from out-of-state! I would add a sarcasm tag, but that would be dishnest.
I daresay that the areas of town happiest about the Phils are precincts that McCain will win.
I notice you used the phrase “sarcasm tag” are you a farker too? not many conservatives there, but there are a few. it is good to beable to debate with people of different ideas...something that rarely happens here.
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