Posted on 09/24/2008 6:33:17 AM PDT by CatOwner
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows Barack Obama attracting 49% of the vote while John McCain earns 47%. It’s the first time in more than two weeks that Obama has enjoyed a lead larger than a single percentage point (see trends). Both men are now viewed favorably by 55% and Rasmussen Markets data currently gives Obama a 52.0% chance of victory (see market results for key states) ...
(Excerpt) Read more at rasmussenreports.com ...
Forget IA, that will go Obama....Might as well consider that state a little piece of Socialism in the heartland of America.
Scratch that. I see that Ras rolling average is for his own polls and does not include the junk.
“For polling data released during the week of September 21-27, 2008, the partisan weighting targets used by Rasmussen Reports will be 39.0% Democratic, 33.5% Republican, and 27.5% unaffiliated. For the preceding week, September 14-20, 2008, the targets were 38.7% Democratic, 33.6% Republican, and 27.7% unaffiliated. “
Take a look at RealClear Politics from 2004, although in all fairness those were LV polls, something we don't seem to get in this election cycle. Bush was clearly ahead in those polls as early as the beginning of September 2004. McCain has not shown the same tendency in the 2008 polls.
If we lose IA, NM, and CO and everything else remains the same from 2004, we lose.
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IA is gone and it looks like we can say the same for NM. CO shouldn’t even be close, but someone told me that Obama’s chief demo group is white collar and young and both are in abundance in CO. Anyway Colorado is slipping away. The good news? Well Penn and Wisconsin both look like we might have better than a 50/50 chance of winning.
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).
Don’t forget about Obama cancelling his subsequent debates in the primary after Hillary cleaned his clock.
Obama isn’t Kerry, and McCain isn’t Bush. It’s not wishful thinking to predict McCain will make worse mincemeat out of him than at the Rick Warren forum (anyone remember the complaining that McCain must’ve cheated since he did better than Obama?)
The debate format favors Obama even less than the church forum.
Why do you think he is oversampling Republicans? He says on his website that he is weighting by party based on a six point plus spread for Democrats (which is too high).
I just crunched some numbers and am beginning to suspect that last night had to be an outlier (which, statistically, happens about 5% of the time). Using Microsoft Excel, fancy math, and some guesswork, I determined that Obama never polled higher than 50 and lower than 47 on any night from 9/13 to 9/22. But to get the result he got today, he had to have pulled 53 last night. This was after he pulled 47 the night before. No way he jumped six points in one night. [Note: I don't actually know what the nightly snapshot numbers are -- this is educated guesswork using Excel. I do know that these nightly numbers on my Excel chart are consistend with Scott's reported results for this period.]
Also, it isn't that McCain had a bad night yesterday if you look just at his numbers. Again, using educated guesswork and Microsoft Excel, I figured that from 9/13 to 9/22 McCain's nightly numbers ranged from 45 to 49. Last night he polled 46, which is pretty much in the fairway of what he has been polling.
Using common sense, nothing happened yesterday that would cause a bunch of undecided voters to switch to Obama, especially when McCain apparently didn't lose any support at the same time. So, I'm guessing that Scott just had a bad sample last night.
Or maybe as important as FReepers seem to put faith in? Bush won in '04 for a couple of reasons, but the debates were not one of them. I'm just saying that we're wrong to put our faith in how well McCain will do in the debates. He may do well, he may not. A safer bet would be to take a cue from what got us the win in '04: a gut-busting effort in key states (like OH) to GOTV in what was shaping up as a close election. That and constant hammering by the candidates and the national party in battleground states. We're going to win or lose this election in places like OH and CO and VA, not in lost causes like NJ or CA, or on rolls of the dice like debates.
I agree. McCain has performed well in debates and during comparative one-on-one settings such as Saddleback. Obama did not perform well in his debates against Hillary and he really does tend to struggle without his teleprompter.
If we lose CO, and IA and NM this election is over unless McCain pick up one of the heavies.
CatOwner if anyone would like to track your posts you seem to post only on polls when McCain is down and then try to set up fear of his doing poorly. You seem only interested and thriving on Obama being ahead. I find that very confusing. Do you not sense McCain doing well in the debates or wish that?
Gallup has D +9, ABC D +10 party gap in their polls. This was consistent with Rasmussen’s numbers throughout 2008.
Currently Ras had D +5.5 as his baseline, but this involves the RNC bump, and may be too optimistic. Definitely, nobody (well, may be Battleground) has it that close.
Yep, his “portraitofAmerica” had Bush winning by 9 in ‘00... His site went belly-up right after that
I don't think McCain will do as well as some here would like to believe. The problem is, he needs to score well in these debates because the economic news, the MSM, and the negatives of a sitting GOP president are dragging him down. I believe there is more pressure on McCain to perform well than Obama.
If we lose IA, NM, and CO, and get NH, we could still win by getting 1 EV in Maine (2nd CD)
We can do it if we can keep McCain from doing his RINO routine. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem possible.
He’s going around attacking people who aren’t responsible and talking about putting people who ARE partly responsible in his cabinet. It’s knee-jerk, spineless, liberal BS from the GOP candidate in a time when people are really tired of fiscal RINOism. People are clamoring for some fiscal conservatism and they can’t seem to get it from anywhere. McCain has dropped the ball on this one big time.
He pulled the RINO act when the problems first started and got hit for it in the polls. Then, he changed the dynamic a bit by running a couple of good ads. Now, he’s reverted back to RINO again.
He’s running around talking about reform and change while supporting the status quo. That’s not acceptable.
The NRA has just started a $40M campaign against Obama, which will help a LOT. But we need our candidate to stop being a mush-brained idiot for another month and a half. Apparently, this is a lot to ask.
Includes 2 days of down markets. It is now obvious the libs will delay as long as they can any help to the financial markets in order to prop op Hussein.
That may not be good news since the probability of turning PA, MI, and/or WI is less than Obama turning IA, NM, CO.
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Gosh, ya know, I’m trying so hard not to get down due to this economic mess and the damnable bias in the media. And with a son serving in the military, the thought of an Obama presidency is a nightmare at the very least. I think the best thing to do is stay on top of what we can to help our side win. I’m donating cash, albeit it’s not a lot. The signs are going up soon in my yard and I keep myself informed with news on the net and radio. Thank the Lord for Free Republic too.
But really it’s looking quite favorable to pick up both Wisconsin and Penn. Also, we haven’t even had the debates yet. That could turn some things around for us. And Colorado isn’t totally gone. I’m very encouraged by the turnout to see both Palin and McCain that they had in Golden.
I just don't put much stock into these state by state polls, and not just because polling in these states is less reliable or tends to lag a week or more behind national polls. I prefer the hard, objectively verifiable data of recent Presidential elections, where you can compare how a state performed relatively to the national average.
If you go by actual past election history, you can say that McCain needs to be leading nationally by 3-4 to have a real shot at winning MI and PA (a three point lead is probably enough to win Wisconsin and New Mexico -- regardless of what the current polls say in those states). Likewise, Obama must be leading nationally by about 3-4 points (actually slightly more) to have a real shot at Colorado. The truth is that if McCain is leading by 3 points nationally, he' going to win in enough states to get to 270 EVs. And ditto for Obama if he is leading by 3 points.
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