GALLUP - McCain 5 points ahead - IN JULY.

[mzmolly]

OPEN LEFT

Tue Jul 29, 2008

A Gallup / USA Today poll came out yesterday showing John McCain ahead among likely voters, 49%-45%. The article on the poll is kind of funny, since it spends most of its time explaining why Gallup came out with another poll, taken during the exact same time, showing Obama ahead 48%-40%, and also why the likely voter sample in the poll is so different from the registered voter sample, which still shows Obama ahead 47%-44%. I have some more quick thoughts on this poll:

The poll should be considered the equivalent and opposite outliers to the four polls showing Obama ahead by double digits: Research 2000, Zogby and, last month, LA Times / Bloomberg and Newsweek.

......

Outliers are an inevitable aspect of polling. One in twenty polls will be off by more than the margin of error, which in the case of most national polls is plus or minus three or four points for each person in the poll. That is, one in twenty polls will be off by at least seven points, and one in forty polls will favor McCain by at least seven points. Given that McCain had led in two of the last eighty polls according to Pollster.com, there is nothing surprising in the least about these results. An outlier in favor of McCain once every forty polls is an inevitable side effect of the most heavily polled election of all time. It would actually have been more surprising if there were no outliers in favor of McCain, ever.

Seems to me Gallup is an outlier among other polls showing the race is quite even in terms of the popular vote?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. "McCain Campaign To Take Out $3M Loan"

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/09/politics/main3482126.shtml

[stillcool]

4. that story is from last year..

I'm not sure if you knew that..

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

6. ...and the OP is from July.

Get with retro news, my friend.

[stillcool]

8. Okay...

I guess I'm missing something...again.

[Pirate Smile]

2. I remember that crazy poll and how the media all dismissed it at the time.

The new one was just as off.

The ones showing it essentially tied seem accurate but now they are focused on the crazy "white women" numbers in the WP/ABC poll. Chuck Todd dismissed those numbers as essentially out of whack today. I think they are bogus and they aren't shown in the other polling like CNN's new poll.

[GOPNotForMe]

3. OOPS, nevermind. nt

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. Gallup Doesn't Weight For Party

There's a large debate among pollsters over whether party identification is fluid, how fluid it is , and whether it makes sense to weigh for party identification...

Gallup doesn't and that affects their results...

The (problem) is the Gallup Poll gets the most press and drives the news coverage...

[politicallore]

7. Why?