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Latest Presidential Tracking Polls 2008
Presidential Candidates
Battleground States
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Polls Don't Always Match... But Who Cares? Obama is Winning10/24/08
The discrepancies in the polls are garnering widespread media attention. Here is what Bloomberg had to say: "More than a dozen national polls have been released this week showing the margin in the presidential race ranging from 1 percentage point to 14 points. " Here is what US News had to say: The AP poll of likely voters, conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media, put Democrat Barack Obama at 44 percent and Republican John McCain at 43 percent, a fairly dramatic counterpoint to other national surveys that, on average, have given Obama a consistent lead of just over 7 percent. Now here is what I have to say: Take a look at the Ohio polls today . Strategic Vision has McCain ahead by 3% while Insider Advantage has Obama ahead by 10%. Obama is ahead by 6% in the weekly average of polls, agreeing more with Insider Advantage. This suggests that Strategic Vision may be, via their polling methodology and likely voter makeup, tainting the results closer towards McCain. Strategic Vision also released polls in Pennsylvania and Florida today. They have McCain performing slightly better (about 3-4%) in those states than do the weekly average of polls. Keep in mind that Strategic Vision is often denoted as a Republican pollster by other compilation websites. So taking all three states into consideration, we can say that Strategic Vision is underrepresenting Obama support, at least in comparison with the other pollsters. Obama is such a new and dynamic political figure that it is near impossible to accurately predict voter turnout. An accurate poll is more than just knowing who to poll, how to poll, what to ask, but also at guessing voter turnout. Barack Obama's margin of victory in the Georgia primaries were off by an average of 20% because all the pollsters underrepresented the African American voter turnout. And to take that into account, Gallup releases national poll numbers with a traditional voter profile and an expanded voter profile. And their results have consistently shown that if they expand the voter profile, Obama's lead is anywhere from 2-5% better than the traditional voter profile. So lots of factors are playing into very varied poll results but here is the point. At no point since the economic crisis have we seen McCain ahead. He is losing. And even though you can find one poll that shows a dead-heat, it is just an outlier to me. Because all signs point to a high voter turnout in this election. And high voter turnout is good news for Obama. And as we said before, McCain does not have the states in his favor.
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Predicted Electoral Math
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| Chinese: 奥巴马, 麦凯恩. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| City Demographics: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
