I appreciate your previous post. I am definitely not someone who rants and raves about polls two months out, I’m also not someone who dwells constantly on the negative, and there are members of both camps on this Forum. I want to acknowledge good news when it appears, and acknowledge bad news when that unfortunately appears. But if there is a definite trend and all of the sudden an oulier pops up, then I’m going to call that an outlier. That said, this new Democratic poll is good news and is more in line with trends in many battleground States showing Mac with small and growing leads. I think Scott hurt his credibility and the credibility of his polls when he admitted the other day on FOX that his latest FL poll could very well be an outlier. In my mind that calls into question his Daily Tracking Poll, but time will tell. Here’s the poll I was talking about, interesting that it comes from a partisan organization:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2078270/posts
“I think Scott hurt his credibility and the credibility of his polls when he admitted the other day on FOX that his latest FL poll could very well be an outlier. In my mind that calls into question his Daily Tracking Poll...”
Better he should publicly admit that his model inputs could be wrong than try to hide it. Very few people know that Zogby made two final calls in 2004, one with the race dead even and one with Kerry winning handily, and then removed the Kerry winning handily one as soon as it became clear Kerry had lost. That kind of shenanigans should undermine a pollster’s credibility, yet people still give Zogby credence. Other people, not me.
Ras is the only pollster I know of who will publicly admit when he thinks he has an outlier. He also admitted in the discussion of his daily tracking poll yesterday that, because of his party weighting, it was not catching the wave for McCain/Palin that was evident in the raw numbers. My guess is he’ll tweak his model, probably October 1st when June’s numbers are due to roll off anyway. Right now he’s averaging June, July and August party identification numbers. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that he will use only September’s numbers in his October polling. Another thing he could do is project a trendline out to November 4th, but that runs the risk of overstating McCain’s final support since he is probably at the peak of his convention bump right now.