If you wanted any more proof that’s it’s unwise to take a single political poll as gospel, I’d like to point you to the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll that was just yesterday pondering whether Senator John McCain begining to gain a lead:

Is McCain making a move? The three-day average holds steady, but McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%. He is beginning to cut into Obama’s lead among independents, is now leading among blue collar voters, has strengthened his lead among investors and among men, and is walloping Obama among NASCAR voters. Joe the Plumber may get his license after all.

Today Pollster John Zogby noted that a one-day poll was not indicative of a shift:

Obama has consolidated his lead over McCain. His single day lead today was back to 52%-42%. He leads by 10 among independents and has solidified his base. He leads among Hispanics by38 points, African Americans by 88, 18-24 year olds by 36, 18-29 year olds by 25, 25-34 year olds by 16, women by 8, and men by 3. He has a 17 point lead among those who have already voted, 22 by those who have registered to vote in the past 6 months, Moderates by 34, Catholics by 10. He even receives 21% support among Conservatives.

So what happened to give McCain a one-point lead in the one-day polling on Friday? It was a day of consolidation for him, too. He had been losing support among key groups and began to regain some of his own base. He now leads by 21 points among NASCAR fans, 9 among investors, 6 among voters in armed forces households, and 2 among voters over 65 years old.

Remember, as I said yesterday, one day does not make a trend. This is a three-day rolling average and no changes have been tectonic. A special note to blogger friends: calm it down. Lay off the cable television noise and look at your baseball cards in your spare time. It is better for your (and everyone else’s) health.

I’ll ignore the shot by Zogby at the blogosphere…

Anyway, if there’s anything I consider most the important lesson I’ve learned during my time following politics, it’s that you must take with a salt lick sized grain of salt what an one-day poll is saying.  And yet, all the time, I see many people always ignoring what other polls have to say and promoting the one that shows their candidate doing best.

To gather whether a shift is really happening, you have to do one of two things:

• Look at the swing states
• Look at the electoral votes

For both these things, I always like to go to the poll averaging sites, and I personally follow three of them reguarly: Real Clear Politics, Pollster, and Electoral-Vote.  There are others, like FiveThirtyEight and ElectoralProjection.  These sites take several polls over a number of days and then average them to give something of a more accurate number.  I’m unsure about the latter two, but Pollster pretty much averages every poll while RCP and E-V leave out the partisan polls.  That’s why Pollster has a state like Arizona and Ohio lightly in McCain and Obama’s columns, while RCP and E-V have them as swing states (these are the “barely” states on E-V).

I think that while polls do have an important place in finding out general views, they can be quite finicky, as shown by Zogby.  And if there’s one thing I’ve noticed on all of the averaging sites, it’s that while there have been small shifts back and forth over time, Obama has pretty much been holding steady for a long time in electoral-vote land.  The race is tightening up as undecided makes their choice, there’s no doubt about that.  State-by-state, there has been some trending toward McCain in several states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, but several states, such as Georgia and Arizona, have been tending toward Obama. Probably just as many for both sides.  That could end up redefining the shape of the state-by-state win pattern on election day, but unless McCain starts leading in electoral votes, he won’t win what matters most: the presidency.

Of course, every poll could be wrong, but I doubt that.  I know people often bring up 2004 and some polls reporting a Kerry win up to election day, but to counter that argument, I offer up an example of how he was looking on this day in 2004 in terms of electoral votes.  He lost his lead the next day and never regained it  when November 2nd was four days before the election.  This year it’s two days before.

I still don’t think we can say the certain what will happen until all the votes are in, but at this point I’m confident in saying that it looks unlikely much will change before Tuesday.