The Gallup national daily tracking poll of the presidential election gave a few people a bit of a scare yesterday when they announced that McCain had pulled even with Obama at 46-46, after having shown Obama with a +2/+5 lead for the previous 8 consecutive days. Apparently that result yesterday was a bit of an outlier, as most of us thought.
Given the leads we have seen for Obama in all the other national polls, it is good to see that Gallup's GOP predisposition isn't strong enough to tilt the outcome, even if they do shade a little high for McCain.
Today's daily tracker shows Obama back to his +3 advantage at 48-45 amongst registered voters nationwide. This result is right in line with the previous Gallup polls and more in line with the other outfits that show Obama with anywhere from a +3 to +9 advantage nationally.
Survey Methods
For the Gallup Poll Daily tracking survey, Gallup is interviewing no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults nationwide each day during 2008.
The general election results are based on combined data from Sept. 23-25, 2008. For results based on this sample of 2,736 registered voters, the maximum margin of sampling error is ±2 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones (for respondents with a landline telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
One of the things that is surprising to see is the strength McCain is showing in the Gallup week of Sept. 15-21 aggregate internalsamongst pure Independent voters (38-24), but perhaps "pure Independent" voters in Gallup tend to vote GOP in the presidential most of the time.
Obama does better with among moderate/liberal Republicans (79-16 McCain) than does McCain in aggregate amongst the two comparable blue groups: conservative Democrats (76-17 Obama) and moderate Democrats (83-10 Obama).
There are some other interesting internals, but as usual they leave you want ing more, especially since they aggregate the internals over a 7-day period, so that the full effect of the current economic crisis is not really reflected.
Meanwhile, over at fivethirtyeight.com there is a very interesting post about Ann Selzer, who is taking a more proactive approach to correcting for the young (18-29) voters who tend to not have landlines. She is showing numbers in a number of states, including Indiana and Michigan, that show far more support for Obama than do the other pollsters. Nate thinks she's the best in the business, so her data will bear watching. Interesting times indeed!