Latest Rasmussen

From Rasumussen:

The latest Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll shows President George W. Bush with 48% of the vote and Senator John Kerry with 47%

The right column shows:

Date        Bush    Kerry

Today        47.9    47.0 

Oct 4        48.6    46.1 

Oct 3        49.0    45.4 

Oct 2        48.6    45.6 

Oct 1        48.7    45.3 

Sept 30      48.5    46.1 

I'd been a bit worried about how little bounce Kerry seemed to get Post-debate. While his numbers DID improve slightly from 9/30 to 10/2, the first day that included Post-debate numbers he actually dropped a point!

Sam Wang's excellent site provided some analyis of problems with Rasmussen's sample methodology:

Rasmussen now weights, and now his presidential tracking poll fluctuates very little. Because party ID and preferred candidate (Bush/Kerry) are strongly correlated, this means that his weighting procedure will always work to reduce the margin of the leading candidate. This may explain why his poll is so stable - statistically, too stable to be right. ... The real problem with weighting is as follows: The horserace result depends on assumptions on party ID. If these covary with sentiment, then real changes will be filtered out, and it will be very hard to learn from weighted data on who is ahead, a basic fact we want from polls.

However, the direction of the trend should be worth something at least, if not the actual magnitude.

The important thing for me is that Bush's number seems to be going down slightly...

If anyone has access to the internals/one day numbers, any further clarification would be much appreciated!