Politicana

The AP ran an article today by Liz Sidoti claiming that the presidential race has tightened to a dead heat, as evidenced by their new poll which showed Obama ahead by just 1 point (44% to 43%).  Sidoti went on to state that McCain has been gaining ground ever since the last debate, which she suggests he won.  She also states that his “Joe the Plumber” storyline has resonated with voters and is helping close the gap.

I was surprised by how much this story line existed outside of any narrative I was familiar with.   So, I decided to look at the latest polls myself.  When I last reported on the polls in my “Preemptive Post,” Obama had an average lead of 8.45% during the previous week of polling.  So, I ran the numbers for the 9 polls I found for the last 7 days and the average of those polls gave Obama a 7.77% lead.  The AP-GfK poll was the only one even close to a dead heat. In fact, 6 of the 9 polls had Obama leading by 8-14 points.

I was further reassured when I visited FiveThirtyEight and saw that Nate’s Super Tracker, “thinks that Obama is now no more than a half a point off his peak numbers.”  The fact that his .5% closely matches the .68%  difference I found between my two sets of polls, suggests that the race may be tightening (as I had thought it would) but not at an alarming rate.  If that rate of decline continues, Obama will lead by an average of 6 points on election day, which is again not far from my prediction of a 5 point lead.

In other words, don’t believe the spin; folks gotta sell papers.