Oops. I shouldn’t check this stuff this early. McCain is up 2 in Battleground. He was only up 1 yesterday.
In Battleground McCain was up 2 yesterday and remains up 2 today. But to be honest, I really don’t trust Battleground that much. As I remember it, they were overly optimistic for Republicans in the last two elections. Still, this poll is a datapoint.
The only poll I regularly trust based on past performance is Gallup. It is the one polling firm that doesn’t attempt to play games with the party ID. As a result, it fluctuates more from day to day than other polls but — guess what — that’s what all of these polls should be doing. The stability of Rasmussen’s daily numbers is mostly an illusion caused by how he chooses to weight the poll samples by party affiliation. It’s art, not science. The scientific approach is simply to take a representative sample of registered voters. If you selected them randomly the way you are supposed to, by definition you will have a representative sample of registered voters. The only art rather than science would involve how Gallup reduces this voter pool to likely voters (which it is very good at doing).