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Before I get to that, I'd also like to point out that John Kerry was nowhere to be found 50 days before the Iowa Caucus.
As for the polling, check out Ruy's take (He's a poll wonk) over at Emerging Democratic Majority.
www.emergingdemocraticmajority.com
(snip) September 13, 2004
Why the Race Is Closer Than People Think Is Bush ahead by a little or a lot? Is it close to a tie ball game or has Bush surged to a commanding lead?
The conventional wisdom inclines to the latter not the former. The reason has a great deal to do with two persistent problems with contemporary polls that--at least at this point in time--tend to considerably inflate Bush's apparent lead. But once you dissect the available data with these problems in mind, a truer picture of the race comes into focus which suggests that the race continues to be very close.
The two problems are: (1) samples that have an unrealistic number of Republican identifiers and hence tend to favor Bush; and (2) the widespread and highly questionable practice of using likely voters (LVs) instead of registered voters (RVs) to measure voter sentiment this far before the election.
First, the issue of partisan distribution in samples. Lately, and very suddenly, many polls have been turning up more Republican identifiers than Democratic identifiers in their samples--in some cases, many more (as high as a 9-10 point Republican advantage).
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