The title at Swing State Project says it all -- Udall Eats Republicans for Breakfast.  While the title may not help Udall with the niche anti-cannibal crowd (and vegetarians, I suppose), it does get its point across.

Just a day after a poll which showed Udall significantly ahead of both Republicans, a Rasmussen poll shows the gap is narrower -- but still very significant.

The Rasmussen Poll results are as follows.  In parentheses are the results from the April 8 Rasmussen poll.  No word on MOE, but I assume it is at or near the +/- 4.5 percent of previous polls by this outfit.

Originally at New Mexico FBIHOP

A lot of people are confused about polls.  There are a couple big areas of confusion that I'd like to cover tonight:

1. Bias vs. variance

2. Margin of error, and how it relates to chance of winning

We may be mostly White, but I guess we are also pretty well Educated and still disproportionately Liberal, because despite a still ongoing nasty disinformation campaign targeting us, Gallup says we Jews still strongly support Obama over McCain.

The more I learn about Obama the more angry I am about the lies of the Jewish Wingers against him. This is a man who has had pro-Israel Jews as friends, senior financial backers, staff and advisors as far back in his career as we know we know... and continuing through with this campaign.

More importantly, Obama clearly gets "it" and gets "us".  The Obama interview in The Atlantic is truly enlightening and brilliant. In the interview, as MJ says

Obama speaks about Israel with more fluency than any candidate we've ever had running for President. He also manages to stay within the bounds of safe discourse on Israel without Palestinian-bashing or jingoism.

The nation's bad mood worsens:

Public disgruntlement neared a record high and President Bush slipped to his career low in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Eighty-two percent of Americans now say the country's seriously off on the wrong track, up 10 points in the last year to a point from its record high in polls since 1973. And 31 percent approve of Bush's job performance overall, while 66 percent disapprove.

The country's mood -- and the president's ratings -- are suffering from the double whammy of an unpopular war and a faltering economy. Consistently for the last year, nearly two-thirds of Americans have said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. And consumer confidence is near its lowest in weekly ABC News polls since late 1985.

Bush's approval rating has been extraordinarily stable -- before today's 31 percent it had been 32 percent or 33 percent in nine ABC/Post polls from July through last month. In presidential approval polls by Gallup since 1934, just three presidents have gone lower: Jimmy Carter, who bottomed out at 28 percent approval in July 1979; Richard Nixon, 24 percent in July and August 1974; and Harry Truman, 22 percent in February 1952.

Bush now has gone 40 months without majority approval, beating Truman's record (also during economic discontent and an unpopular war) of 38 months from 1949-52.

The "extraordinary" stability in Bush's approval rating is only matched the how extraordinarily bad he is at this job. He still, however, has 69% approval from fellow Republicans. The third of Americans who consider themselves independent, however, give him just a 24% approval in this poll.

So the question for McCain is whether he's going to play Maverick for those independents who hate Bush, or is he going to continue to work on consolidating his base, those 69% of Republicans who have left planet reality. It's a conundrum that even his surrogates haven't quite figured out. Via Think Progress, we've got dueling surrogates Romney and Blunt on whether McCain would give us Bush's third term on the economy.

On CNN’s Late Edition today, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) claimed that the argument that John McCain would, in effect, be a third Bush term "isn’t going to stick":

BLITZER: [Obama] says he welcomes a debate with John McCain on the issue of the economy, taxes, spending policy because John McCain would simply be more George W. Bush. ... Does John McCain want to continue what Obama called the failed policies of the Bush administration?

ROMNEY: Well I think you’re going to hear that time and again, Wolf, throughout the campaign season. And I just don’t think it’s going to stick.

But earlier on the same program, a leading McCain surrogate — Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) — conceded that McCain is indeed promising a third Bush term on the economy:

BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?

BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.

Alright, so one of my pet peeves about modern campaigns - and especially modern media coverage of those campaigns - is the relentless obsession over the horserace numbers in polling.  Rarely do individual numbers matter so much as the trend, especially if that trend is long term and/or noticed across polling firms.

Yet, idiotic "professional" pundits always seem to get how polling works completely wrong.  Take Stu Rothenberg's latest assessment, for example.

Much has been made of the fact that McCain was edging both Obama and Clinton from Bittergate until the Wright news cycle finally stopped.  

Shouldn't McCain's numbers have been much higher than the 41-50% range (more consistently 44-46% and Gallup only had McCain hitting 50% four times against either Dem candidate) in GE polling during that time?

This late in the game, there are a good number of states already in the bag and a lot of polls have come and gone.  This seems like a good time to check on the performance of the various polling organizations so far in state level Democratic contests.

For the results on this table, I've consulted the final results from each state as well as polling data from Pollster .com and Real Clear Politics.  I've only included primaries that were polled by at least two of the major pollsters.  I've dropped results from pollsters who didn't poll a significant number of states (more than a couple), even when that meant bumping Gallup or CBS.  And I've only included polls that happened in the last week before the election.  Here are the results.

In the center of this table is the actual results for that state.  Of example, in Iowa Senator Obama won by a (rounded) 8% while in New Hampshire, Senator Clinton won by 3%.  The values indicated for each pollster are for their relative performance vs. the actual results.  In Iowa, Strategic Vision said that Obama would win by 3, but he won by 8, so their prediction was 5 to the Clinton side of the line.  In New Hampshire, Rasmussen predicted that Obama would win by 7, but Clinton won by 3, so they were 10 to the Obama side of the prediction.  In several instances (including Iowa) several predictions fell on the same spot, so I've bumped a poll one space left or right just to make it visible.  I've tried to randomize these moves so that everyone got treated fairly on a visual basis, and when it comes to the numeric analysis, I used the raw numbers so this nudging has no effect.

One thing that's immediately obvious is that the "polls show more votes for Obama than he gets" effect does not seem to exist when polls for all states are considered.  If anything, more polls lean toward Clinton in the run up to election day than Obama.  This is aided by pollsters like Mason-Dixon, which has been "pro-Clinton" in their analysis for every state but one.  Strategic Vision erred to the Clinton side of the line in every contest but New Jersey.  Insider Advantage had numbers that were more pro-Clinton than the actual results in every state.  Rasmussen and Survey USA both come in close to neutral, but still lean to the Clinton side.  Among the pollsters examined, only Zogby tended to give a more pro-Obama number than the actual results.

Comparing the average error between last prediction and actual results, the "lean" of the poll toward one candidate or the other, and the rate of prediction of winners gives some interesting results.  

Insider Advantage leaned toward Clinton on every prediction and had the highest error rate in predicting final results.  However, they still managed to pick the winner in the six contests for which they had data in the final week.

On the other hand, Rasmussen, while much more neutral when it comes to leaning toward a candidate, managed to miss in 6 of the 18 contests they called -- a 33% error rate in selecting the winner, and that's generous considering that among the states they called were such gimmes as Illinois and New York.  

Only Zogby managed to match that final result for awfulness of prediction.  In fact, as anyone who has watched the results this year might have noticed, Zogby has been miserable both on the numbers and the results. They've managed to miss in 1/3 of the primaries (to give them some credit, their correct picks aren't bolstered by New York or Illinois) and come close to Insider Advantage in the overall error percentage.

Survey USA has been close on the numbers in almost every case.  One of their misses came in the close contest in Texas, where they called it Obama by one.  The only real screw-up of the year for SUSA was their call for a big Clinton win in Missouri.  Were it not for that that call and (like everyone else) underestimating Obama's landslide in South Carolina, SUSA would be sporting an amazing batting average.  The number of states where SUSA has been extremely close to the final result shows that in many cases their model of the electorate was dead on.

So, how does all this apply to the upcoming contests in Indiana and North Carolina?

North Carolina has been tracked by Survey USA, Insider Advantage, Rasmussen, and Mason-Dixon.  Here are the values as they stand and adjusted to reflect the "lean" indicated in previous contests.

Indiana has fresh numbers from fewer sources, which is surprising considering the closeness of the contest.  In any case, here are the actual and adjusted values.

Do I believe the adjusted numbers?  Well, since Insider Advantage and Zogby have the highest error percent and Survey USA has the lowest, I'd personally give it extra weight.  Call it Obama by 8 in North Carolina, and Clinton by 4 in Indiana.

Now I'm going to sit back and hope that SUSA used the same model for predicting Indiana that it used in Missouri.  If it's any comfort, the SUSA/Zogby numbers on Indiana look very much like the Missouri prediction on Super Tuesday.  So maybe this will be the second time SUSA took a hike into the weeds.  Don't hesitate to check the numbers.  Any time I'm allowed to do this much math in one sitting, it's an invitation to disaster.

Sometimes, I really don't get the people over at MyDD or those in the mainstream media. It's like they hear something coming from a candidate they support and not only accept it as a fact, but zealously promote it like there was hard, irrefutable evidence backing that candidate up. It's sort of how Armstrong has had his progressive credentials finally revoked after this whole gas tax holiday dust-up: He knows it is bad policy (or at least I hope he does), but he is supporting it and using Clinton's talking points because he supports Clinton. I'm not saying that Obama supporters are immune to this, but the Fox episode shows that most of us are not unwilling to call him out when he makes a mistake.

Because I am trying to procrastinate on my final term papers, I got myself all in a bunch because, while browsing some AP articles and comments at MyDD, I see that there is this misconception that Obama was ahead by twenty or more percentage points and the fact that Clinton will (most likely) win the state is a victory of epic proportions. No doubt, after the results come in tomorrow, the Clinton campaign will be promoting this same line of silly logic.

More on the flip.

I haven't seen a diary of NC/IN polls recently, so I decided to do it myself. So, I just gathered up all the latest polls out of North Carolina and Indiana.

FiveThirtyEight.com, which makes predictions based on demographic data from past polls, has predicted the margins for every Congressional district in both states. Their models predict a net gain of 17 delegates for Obama (102 to 85). However, in both states, FiveThirtyEight's predictions are more optimistic for Obama than the polls seem to be.

All the polls you could ever want, below the fold.

OK, so as it stands today, PPP (which is native, and did well in South Carolina) has Obama up 10 in NC, and SUSA (which has been good all-around) has Hillary up 12(!) in Indiana.

What will tomorrow hold?

The MSNBC evening lineup (especially Road to the White House) gave a fair amount of play tonight to a couple of results from the new NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll. This was sort of like a non-partisan push poll: voters were read a series of nine negative statements -- three for each of the three remaining candidates -- and asked about their level of concern on each one.

MSNBC spent most of their time focusing on two of these issues -- what I call "Obama/bitter" (his recent comments on religion and guns) and "Obama/values" (his associations with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers). You might assume, from having seen the programming, that these were the foremost concerns to their poll respondents. But of course they weren't.

I got polled!  This is actually the first time ever that I've been polled.  The poll was conducted by Opinion Research Corporation so it's probably a CNN poll, but could be associated with the Clinton campaign.  There were some pretty loaded questions in the poll.

Ok, I've HAD IT.  Today marks day 2 of my daily endorsement series on dailykos.  For those of you who missed me yesterday, I can tell you that I'm sick and tired of sitting idle while the newest concern-troll-of-the-day, masquerading as an AP writer, finds his political commentary conveniently published on the front page of Yahoo News--the same regurgitated story about Obama and his supposed struggle to win over white voters.  I don't know about you but I don't like it when someone puts words in my mouth or votes in my ballot box.  I guess I could say nothing about these daily attacks and refuse to check my Yahoo email account from now until 2009 but I need to vent today and tomorrow and the next day too.

As a white dude with white skin, white parents, grandparents who were white when they were alive and probably still white in the afterlife and white European ancestors, I hereby endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States of America even if I only count for .0001% of a pledged delegate.

North Carolina activist David LaMotte just got a push poll call from the firm of Geoff Garin, the new head of Hillary Clinton's campaign team. It wasn't as bad as asking "would it change your mind if you knew John Kerry actually bought his Vietnam medals off E-Bay." Or "How do you feel about John McCain's illegitimate black children?" But it was a push poll nonetheless, even if it also had elements of information gathering and message testing. This isn't the first time that the Clinton campaign or their allies have had pollsters offering positive information about Clinton and negative information about her opponents--they did it on the eve of the California primaryand in South Carolina.  (And firms linked to the Giuliani campaignmade highly negative push poll calls against Mitt Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire) But it's a disturbing practice precisely because it tries to spin the recipient under the pretense of merely asking about their views.

Cross-posted from Future Majority.

CIRCLE has crunched what numbers they could and here are the results from yesterday's primary:

There are a boatload of caveats that come with these stats.

Yesterday, in a conversation about the Gallup tracking, I posted this (with my subsequent correction):

I've been playing along with the Gallup Numbers at home trying to guess the dailies behind the 3-day rolling.  Here's my best guess

Apr: O-C

13. 51-40

14. 50-42

15. 50-43

16. 48-42 (debate in pm)

17. 44-48

18. 44-47

19. 52-40

20. 50-40

Now, this has a MoE of infinity, but the numbers do add up, and it makes sense: Things were pretty stable until the debate, then Obama took a 2-day hit, recovering by the weekend.  If we see something like 50-40 tomorrow, it'll suggest this is right.

The New York Times gave focus last week to voter dining habits but failed to discuss circumstances why voters make these choices.

The family restaurant Fuddruckers and fast-food restaurant Hardee’s were favorites among likely McCain voters. Mrs. Clinton’s likely supporters skewed toward Red Lobster and Krispy Kreme. The Cheesecake Factory, along with Panera Bread and Starbucks, were popular among groups likely to vote for Mr. Obama.

Fuddruckers and Hardee's know they have as much chance winning over the same states McCain does. The chains are absent in the Northeastern US but predominant in the south. Both brands have been well-established throughout the Middle East for decades where absentee voters would presumably lean Republican working in oil, security and the armed services; and Hardee's promoted free food for stationed troops and Camp Doha issues monthly passes to Fuddruckers.

Public Policy Polling (the most accurate pollster this election cycle) has released their final Pennsylvania poll: they are projecting (drum roll)........

Obama 49

Clinton 46

Link (PDF)

WHOOO-WAAAH !!