Gallup Tracking Poll Thread [Obama vs McCain]

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This is a complete weekend sample in Gallup polling.

Unless it's a long weekend, that's never going to be the case.  Gallup is a three-day tracker.

Are people going to vote in November on a weekend?  That's the big question.

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Carl, I have an honest question: Are national polls necessarily more immune from bad samples?  Or do little pockets of weakness (cell-only, non-response, multiple landlines etc.) expose themselves more in a national poll?

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Let's go for double digits!!!!

Well, if it's gonna happen it will happen tomorrow (given that weekend data, apparently, overstates Obama's lead).

Dave

Think about it this way: Perhaps mid-week date overstates McCain's lead. How 'bout that?

the election is on a Tuesday

Deadpan sarcasm > regular sarcasm

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What time of day are the polls conducted for Gallup?

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I'm looking foward to seeing the impact of his speech. About 40 million people watched it live.

Note: That is more than the final episode of American Idol or the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games.

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day-to-day, per 538:

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Trying to figure out the day by day totals of the tracking polls is nothing but guesswork.

You are basing assumptions off of assumptions. You are assuming that you know what the day rolling off is, in order to determine what the new day coming on is. After days upon days of guesswork, the margin of error becomes very large, thus putting those numbers in high doubt.

If by "guesswork" you mean a mathematical algorithm, then I agree.

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I wish we held our convention after theirs. Fu ck tradition.

I doubt this accounts for any real difference. So McCain gets a lead for a week or two. Big whoop.

Two weeks is where you start getting problems.

If McCain is ahead or with end 2% in two week, you can count Sen. Obama out. Sen. McCain well do very well in the debates and Sen. Obama will not.

2% and it's over?  Wow.

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MCCain is probably up 3-4 points right now. *Sigh*

Actually, should the poll be 100% accurate, McCain is up less than 3 points since it's a 3 day rolling average.

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Gallup's at +2.

Today's sample could have been about Obama -1 to 0 to get this result, right?

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McCain's in trouble now!  The trend is there!  THE TREND

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Are all three polls three day rolling averages?  I haven't checked the Kos or Diago since I find them less interesting.

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Nooooo...stop siiiiinking.

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To go from O+3 to tied is a big jump.

If the numbers were previously static (assuming no pro-Obama numbers rolling off the three-day), that would mean a +9 jump for McCain in the dailies.  We'll know if this was an outlier in 3 days.  The other three dailies give some affirmative evidence that Gallup's might be off, but I like Gallup so I'll wait and see.

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Friday, September 26, 2008
Obama 48% (+2)
McCain 45% (-1)

Whoah, what sort of numbers are required for Obama to drop 3 and then go up 3 in subsequent days?

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Economic fears are interesting.  Americans lose faith in the economy EXTREMELY quickly, but they don't gain faith back in the economy anywhere near as fast.  It's pretty well documented that consumer confidence ticks upward a small amount every month.

JJ predicting that "As soon as the crisis fades, so does Obama's lead" is a false prognostication, because I doubt most of the electorate can just flip a switch in 40 days and start thinking about  Iraq and whatnot again.  If the economy recovers fully in the next couple weeks, it's good for McCain, but there will still be a lingering strong dissatisfaction of, and focus on, the economy for many months ahead among a sizable (dare I say, majority?) amount of voters.

That said, 8%= rad.

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Well, it wasn't to hard to predict the media would give the "win" to Obama. I knew that no matter how well McCain did they were going to say Obama won.  The media is completely carrying all the water for Obama. They are doing everything they can to get him in office it's quite obvious. Obama and the Democrats are NOT being attacked for their policies which created this housing crisis. The Politically Correct loans are not being pointed out by either McCain or his camp. Need I really go on? Lets just get ready for a president Obama. And I'll get ready to give Mr Neophyte one big number one finger when he takes the oath.

Actually, the slight majority of media pundits, including left-leaning ones, like Greg Sargent on the incredibly left-leaning site, TalkingPointsMemo, gave the win to McCain.  I don't know what the heck you are talking about.

It was the flashpolls that gave the win to Obama, and the media relied on these multiple polls of undecided viewers to analyze the debate in the days after.

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Economic fears are interesting.  Americans lose faith in the economy EXTREMELY quickly, but they don't gain faith back in the economy anywhere near as fast.  It's pretty well documented that consumer confidence ticks upward a small amount every month.

I disagree with the statement, "As soon as the crisis fades, so does Obama's lead." because I doubt most of the electorate can just flip a switch in 40 days and start thinking about  Iraq and whatnot again.  If the economy recovers fully in the next couple weeks, it's good for McCain, but there will still be a lingering strong dissatisfaction of, and focus on, the economy for many months ahead among a sizable (dare I say, majority?) amount of voters.

That said, 8%= rad.

Since the markets dropped today worse than they did on 9/11, and there are no perfectly timed tax breaks (purely by accident in '01) to arrive right afterwards, I'm not convinced that the economy can convincingly recover itself out of most American's mind by November.


... biggest one day drop in the history of Wall Street.  Nice job Congress.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority

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An effective argument doesn't commit obvious, ridiculous logical fallacies, that's all.  Since I was browsing Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies at the time, the link was way convenient.  To say that you're unable to make an argument without committing a logical fallacy seems a bit overboard, but yo, whatevsky, that's cool.


Btw: Alcon, I don't care 'bout your Gallup-discussing thread

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NOOOOOO

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I don't see why Obama fans see this as a problem. He still has a 4-6 point lead.

Because we're flighty and prone to mood swings.

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I don't see why Obama fans see this as a problem. He still has a 4-6 point lead.

Because we're flighty and prone to mood swings.

and erratic, and politically unsound....

Don't worry.. in 20 years you will be a Libertarian or a conservative.. you are far too intelligent to continue to hold your current views..

Aww.  I'm actually registered Libertarian and became Democratic because I'm moonlighting 10 hours a week at an online Democratic consulting firm.  So it's gone in the reverse direction

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