From Investors’ Business Dailty [1]:
IBD/TIPP Tracking Poll: Day Eleven
Posted: Thursday, October 23, 2008McCain has cut into Obama’s lead for a second day and is now just 1.1 points behind. The spread was 3.7 Wednesday and 6.0 Tuesday. The Republican is making headway with middle- and working- class voters, and has surged 10 points in two days among those earning between $30,000 and $75,000. He has also gone from an 11-point de?cit to a 9-point lead among Catholics.
A nod to Mrs Bit, who pointed this one out to me this morning, along with a half dozen others. She’s been getting depressed at the numbers of late. I told her this morning:
Like I told you; Relax.
It’s like I said in the Ramble the other night… Over the last 20 years or so I’ve been writing on the various networks I’ve often openly wondered if the various polling orgs (and those who hire them) weren’t trying to create their own reality.
The suspicion I’ve held all that time is that there’s a lot of folks using ‘polling data’ to create the impression of momentum… and of course the image projected usually spins toward the candidate farthest to the left. In this case, Obama. Then again, it always seems to ‘tighten up’ just before election day, with the more conservative candidate gaining huge numbers in a very short time, for no action that anyone can logically attribute. The pattern is so established, I’m amazed that nobody’s noticed it. It’s almost axiomatic.
I remember predicting Bush 41’s victory in his second race, as an example, suggesting the numbers would change back to reality less than 48 hours before the actual election, lest some bright person get the idea of comparing the polling numbers to the actual vote, and a lot of pollsters being out of work, or at least exposed, thereby. Of course, that’s exactly what happened.
That’s a trend that I first noted in Reagan’s first term race, and seems to have been the pattern ever since. It’s certainly holding true here.