Don’t trust them. Pollsters simply admit that they do not know what they are doing. It’s “an art,” not “a science” at this point.
Pollsters do not know how to deal with the change of the electorate, party affiliation, new voter registration, the turnouts both campaigns hope for, etc. Obama, for instance, hopes that voters under 30 (years of age) will turn out in numbers never seen before. Many other Democrats hoped this as well in the past decades, but young voters consistently showed up in smaller numbers than expected, let alone hoped for.
Then there are polls that put the affiliation numbers of both parties at ridiculous percentages. Some pretend that the gap is 10% or more when they conduct polls. As pollster John Zogby explained, that’s sheer insanity.
Pollsters also differ on who ‘likely voters’ will be. Some us the traditional method, others a completely new one which favors Obama dramatically. And then there are again others who try to find a middle ground.
In other words, the polls are almost certainly not correct.
The trend, however, they may have captured quite well; Obama is leading, but McCain has surged a bit in the last week.
What is more important than national polls is the electoral map. Here too not all polls should be taken for granted, but the general trends can be assumed to be reasonably correct. These trends are in Obama’s favor; increasingly more swing states are moving towards him, and he’s now even attack McCain in traditionally red States.
Obama is going for a landslide, and I believe he could accomplish it, but the public should know that the polls cannot be trusted as such, at this point in time. Look for the trends, not for the exact numbers.
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