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I don't have the exact polls and their demographic weightings in front of me, but off the top of my head:

1)The polls are sauced to favor Kerry/Dems...one of those polls (I can't recall if it is one you mentioned) was *adults*, which will always swing left, but doesn't mean much as it doesn't indicate the subset of *likely* voters, which swings to our side. Ras, IIRC, has a 2pt skew to Kerry and that, I think, has been said to be the weighting for GOTV in favor of the Dems. We showed in 2002 that we can GOTV and we will this time, too.

2) Even where Kerry has gotten a tiny bump, W has also gone up, so the *bump* is 2 pts and w/in the MOE, therefore, there is no real change and the race is effectively tied acording to these polls. Many of these polls were slapped together overnight and may or may not be accurate.

3) Internals are not publicized. No campaign is going to sauce the internals. That is how they know how they are doing. I stated that from their actions and the bits of leaking that has been caught by the political columns, the Kerry internals are not wonderful and the Bush internals are good. Confident campaigns act like the Bush campaign, not like the Kerry campaign.

4) The main role of push polls, which these all are, is to take advantage of a perceived peer pressure effect: people will vote w/whomever is seen to be the winner. That, however, seems to be canceled out by the savvier electorate this time, who do not seem to be buying it.

5) All this media politicking for Kerry and all the sauced polls SHOULD have given Kerry a solid 5-8pt lead even before the Edwards pick and then another solid bounce from that. Instead, it took 2 days for minuscule bumps to appear and W did not fall and in fact came back up today. In the tracking poll by Ras, which is only good to see the trends, today, Kerry's lead fell to within the MOE.

These are illusory *leads* for Kerry. Look at the state polls, where the leads are large. If all W is losing in July,in the state polls, with nonstop Bush bashing by the media, is a few percentage points, he looks to be keeping the states he won in 2000. With increased ECVs from reapportionment due to increased census numbers, it looks ok, so far for W at around 272-279 EVs or so.