Isn't that the truth? Rasmussen only seems reliable because he changes his polls the last week before the election to reflect what is happening. For anyone to pay attention to these polls and take them apart is wasting time.
Count all polls as worthless and watch what a campaign is doing with their people. When a candidate pulls ads where he has been heavily advertising or people out, their internals show the state is out of reach. If they send in a lot of people to a state that they thought they had in the bag internals are showing either a tight race or they are behind.
My guess on Obama is that FL is pretty much out of reach so far; PA, WI, and MN are either very close or McCain is out ahead because he is sending his wife into PA to meet with military spouses like that will do anything. He is also concentrating on MN and WI. He has real trouble with WI if Green Bay is going to tip the election. Then we had the polls touting Obama was close in ND but they pulled out everything in the state to send to other states. He is spending money and resources where he thought he didn't have to because those states were his.
Internal polls are always more reliable. Pres Bush being in trouble in FL was picked up internally in 2000 way before the pollsters picked it up and why so many trips started being made to FL. Bottom line watch where staff is being sent and the ad buys to see where a state stands. My guess is that Obama is in trouble in a lot of blue states right now the way he is acting and the amount of people they are sending into the state. If NC was really in play for Obama, you would see a lot more activity out of McCain into the State.
My two cents!
Is there a central source of where the candidates AND STAFFERS are going?
It would be nice if we had a “dollar map”.
That would pretty much trump the general national polling bs.
You are dead on, PhiKapMom!
McCain has people that do polling for him, and those people HAVE to be accurate. So their actions mirror exactly where things are.
All of these other polling outfits can be wrong, and no one will care after election day, because they will be right back next time doing the same stuff!
No polling outfit from 2004 went out of business no matter how inaccurate they were.