First, take my below analysis with a grain of salt. Kerry is behind, and we need to understand that. But I also don't want us all flailing about like Chicken Little.
That said, the ABC News analysis notes a few details of its sampling:
-- They had more GOPers than Dems by 6 percentage points.
-- Kerry is losing 12% of Dems to Bush; Bush, 6% of GOPers to Kerry
-- Battleground states are tied among registered voters.
This gives us a partial picture of internals, but not a full one - which is why you need to take this with a grain of salt.
So we have Kerry down 43-52 in a three-way race. Looking at the two party vote, that's overall 54.7 percent Bush, 45.3 percent Kerry. (52/95 = x/100...ah, proportions!)
Now, the national party ID percentages are 39D, 35R, 26I. But we have 6% more GOP in this poll. So let's keep independents steady at 26, bump GOP to 40 and Dems down to 34. Combining that with the aforementioned Kerry/Bush numbers among their partisans, and assuming that if the battleground states are tied, so are the numbers among independents (my biggest assumption), we have this as our starting point:
.............D.......R.......I
Kerry......88......6......50
Bush.......12......94.....50
Using proportions and the guesstimated 40R/34D/26I party breakdown of the poll, we come up with these unweighted figures for the two-party vote in a three-way race:
Kerry 45.3 percent
Bush 54.7 percent
This is in fact identical to their actual results, as noted above.
Well, what if we weigh these figures according to national party ID (39D/35R/26I)? Things look far better:
Kerry 49.42 percent
Bush 50.58 percent
What does it all mean? Hell if I know. It's certainly weird that we have all these polls oversampling Republicans. So, take it with a grain of salt, or an entire salt shaker, but at least force a smile and go out there and fight.