Also to Vorlon, I remeber you saying you did expect Bush to pull within one or two in today's sample. With Bush pulling even, did Bush poll ahead of Kerry last night? Or was it simply the dropping of Sunday night's results? I'm sure everyone agrees with me, but I appreciate your analysis and enjoy hearing it.
I posted a real "quickie" take on the Gallup FYI.
Regarding last night's Rassmussen sample:
Actually, Bush is still "down" 45.3 to 44.7% although certainly .6% is statistically meaningless.
You notice I stopped posting a daily breakout of Rasmussen a few weeks back.
I had a faily long set of email exchanges with Scott Rasmussen on this matter because I was having trouble getting his daily results to reconcile with his 3 day rolls.
Rasmussen does not "exactly" produce a one day sample. He does drop off the data from 3 days ago and replaces it with the latest one day set of data, but then he reweights the entire 3 day data set - there is no "one day" total per se.
I have reworked my daily breakout of Rasmussen by recursively reweighting the individual days in a way Scott intimated would be appropriate, and based on that, yes indeed Bush "won" last nights sample by about 2.7% (In a recursive weight I can calculate the "gap" between the candidates but not the exact percentages)
Given the big bounces that happen in a smallish one day sample, I urge real caution on reading anything into this one day result.
Recursively pulling the "gap" is even more likely to be subject to big statistical changes. - I can say Bush "won" by 2.7% last night with greater accuracy than using dice and tarrot cards - but only
marginally so..