Small thing that's really starting to annoy me....
Like most of you, I was excited to see that groups are rating the performance of polls.
But these rating systems are using the current national popular vote count to measure pollster performance. Or...the national popular vote from 10am this morning. Or God knows when.
The problem is that using this morning's national popular vote margin is wrong. The national popular vote will shift toward Obama quite a bit. Nate Cohn (TNR's Electionate) estimated this morning that it could shift as much as 1.2%.
It's obvious why this is the case: California. But it's not just California. There are a ton of ballots to count - many of which are actually in states that the networks are reporting at 100%.
At any rate - if you're measuring pollster performance using an outdated national popular vote margin as your baseline, you're probably not fit to measure pollster performance.
I don't write this to take away any of the excitement from PPP's performance. In fact, they may still end up as one of the best pollsters. Their final poll had it at Obama +3, and he'll probably end up at +3.4 at the most.
Think of it this way: if this data were run with accurate numebrs, Rasmussen would be EVEN WORSE.