In general, I don't trust Fox as presenting balanced news. But even a Fox News Poll shows Obama leading by 7 percentage points an increase from 6 percentage points from 2 weeks ago. Newsweek is showing an 11 percentage point lead. Most polls are showing that Obama is widing his lead lately and that momentum is favoring Obama. Has anyone seen anything different?

Polls have been wrong so many times that it is surprising that they are still done.

The only polls that matter are the ones in November taken in schools across the country.

How many people do you know that have actually voted in one of these pre-election polls?

Problem with these things is you don't know who is really being polled and since 3/4 of Obama supporters are welfare recipients sitting home watching soaps all day, I guess they are more likely to be home when the phone rings.

My house has been called 3 times in the last 2 months by pollsters. No one is ever home to answer the phone because we work around here.

Polls can be wrong, but I've been around a long time and haven't seen an election like this one since Mondale. Votes are hemorrhaging from the GOP nearly as fast as they did in that election cycle. The combo of negative campaigning and the most laughable excuse for a VP candidate I've ever seen has lead GOP members to to publicly state they will not support this ticket. Joe six-pack and Janie hockey-mom are openly talking about not voting GOP.

I'm in TN - it doesn't get much redder anywhere. Obama bumper stickers are everywhere and people are saying they just can't vote for McCain. While most are voting Barr or staying home (something I can respect because Obama is not a candidate for conservatives), it is telling that they don't feel that can vote for McCain-Palin. When I've ask why, the reasons have pretty much boiled down to these:

• McCain is elderly and not in good health and Palin isn't qualified to be the prez.
• The negative campaigning and lies have turned them away.
• Don't feel McCain is qualified to be prez because of things like 'the economy is fundamentally sound' followed by suspending his campaign and rushing off to save the economy, signing on to the bailout bill, suggesting the US buy up bad mortgages and energy plans that won't get us off oil fast enough

You are so wrong on so many levels. Republicans only go out for some smokes, drinks, and to tend to their farms.

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"Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy." -fortune cookie

You can check out gallup or rasmussen or any number of different pollsters on their websites. I like Realclearpolitics the best because it's a non-partisan site that just gives you a compendium of pollsters, the "poll-of-polls" numbers, and they throw up a great variety of columns by writers from all over the spectrum.

The useful pollsters tell you about their sampling data. Rasmussen is conservative in their estimates because they take a more cautious sample of voters. For instance, the number of registered Dems in the country is like 39%, to the Republicans 29%, with Indie voters around 30%. Some pollsters go with that average in their samples, but Rasmussen and Survey USA tend to have about a 5 or 6 point spread between Dems and Repubs instead of something like 9 or 10 points that many of the others are using.

This is why you see a little more of a conservative and cautious result with the FOX poll and with Rasmussen, who have Obama up by 7%, and why Newsweek and Gallup are at 11%.

If I had to make any predictions, I'd have to say that Rasmussen is probably right around where the truth is.

What's been clear is that other than a two week stretch where Obama lost his lead and then things got tied up, he's been gaining about a point a week or more on average since then in all the polls.

We've seen dramatic change in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan, which were air tight for so long. We saw a complete sea change in Florida, where Obama was down by an average of 5 for the longest time, and then we saw an 8 to 10 point swing in just two and a half weeks or so.

Watch out for West Virginia now. Obama was behind by 7 or 8 the whole campaign, and the latest polls have shown him ahead by 2 and then by 8.

In the RCP poll-of-polls just before the election in 2004, Bush lead by 1.5%. He took it by nearly 3%, so the polls were dead on. In Florida and Ohio, Bush was up on average by 2 in Florida, and he took it by 5, and Ohio was basically tied, with Bush taking it by 2. So the polls are actually right way more than they're wrong, and even though Ohio didn't go Kerry's way, it was within the margin of error.

One of the stories that has been neat to follow in the last few months are polling methodologies. Like, did you know that many high-profiled pollsters are trying to offset the Bradley effect by posing certain questions to people? They're taking into account a small percentage of people they think might be lying to pollsters when they slip in questions like, "Have you been to a dinner party where there's a black person?".

The polls tell us so many things, but they don't tell us other things as well. Like in Georgia, where the black vote represented 25% of the vote in 2004. This year, the pollsters have increased likely black turnout by just 2%. In over 400,000 early ballots cast already in that state, 39% is coming from blacks. Will the numbers stay that high on election day? Or are blacks just getting a leg up on voting now in order to avoid long lines? It's hard to say until we see all the results. But it's so fascinating.

Somebody should make an exciting movie about pollsters and pollstering.

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“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."-Sarah Palin, not having a clue once again about what she is talking about.

If they are done right they are a pretty good indicator, and it's not just FOX that shows Obama way ahead of McCain, it's all the polls.
And in the state by state polls it looks like Obama wins about 350 electoral votes.
There are three weeks and one debate left, and the biggest boost to Obama has come from the financial crisis, the public sees it as mainly a republican problem that a Democrat would be better suited to fix, I don't see the financial crisis going away in three weeks, and I don't see McCain has the skills to wipe the floor with Obama in that last debate.

When polls are wrong they aren't wrong by much, and there is usually a flaw in the methodology that gets identified. But the biggest apparent flaw in the current polling, the Cellphone Effect, would cause the polls to understate Obama's support.

Something could come along and change the major issue from the economy to something else, but that gets less likely with every tick of the clock, as time is running out for McCain.

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“ The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”

Adam Smith , The Wealth of Nations 1776

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics"
FDR's second Inaugural Address

This is really now a choice about whether McCain wants to go down with dignity or not.

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“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."-Sarah Palin, not having a clue once again about what she is talking about.

The pollsters don't poll folks with cell phones. How many people do you know that only have cell phones?

Actually quite a few, and all young first time voters, and all enamored of Obama.

This is similar to the 1948 election, where telephone polls underestimated Truman's support, because Republicans were more likely to have telephones than Democrats.

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“ The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”

Adam Smith , The Wealth of Nations 1776

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics"
FDR's second Inaugural Address

Maybe those polls are in the interest of the McCain campaign as well, after all they are mobilizing the Republicans who might think about skipping the election. On the other side it has the opposite effect on Democrats.

In the end that could lead to a result where McCain manages to win.

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""Even though our unity is our strength, our diversity remains our wealth,""
Herman Van Rompuy

Omitting cell phone users may affect polls - Computers - MSNBC.com

Stephen's Lighthouse: Cell Phone Only

Interesting notion.

okay so we are back to "the polls count",,,,okey doke...

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"The captain has turned off the `No Dubbing' sign. You are free to speak any language you choose."

It's back and forth, depending on how their guy is doing and how it can be spun.

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Andy
Cynical Optimist

Exactly. The normal American citizen who gets up, eats breakfast, goes to work, comes home and watches television and eats supper/dinner with his or her family do not even know what the polls are. If called, they are called in the middle of the afternoon when they are not at home. The pollsters reach the TV viewing Soap Opera welfare recipients at a much larger rate than the working class citizen. If on the computer, they usually don't answer for fear of adding cookies to their hard drive. So, as I said before, polls are not an indication of how the American people feel about any given candidate.