Quote from jem:
Oh wait... even your NY Times blog which you just cited...agrees with what I have been saying for months. you are quoting shit for polls.
By NATE SILVER
There are certainly some good reasons to think that the polls could break toward Mitt Romney. For instance, many polls out now were conducted among registered voters; when pollsters switch over to likely voter polls instead â which assess each voterâs probability of actually casting a ballot on Nov. 6 â it is likely that Mr. Romney will gain a point or two. And Barack Obama obviously has a lot of weight to bear from the lukewarm economic recovery.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/do-presidential-polls-break-toward-challengers/
in fact some of the polls you are quoting AK are even more slack than registered voters polls. They are random polls... So you will see a really big kick towards Romney when they go to likely voters.
Nice article,you should have posted all of it.It is long so I'll post some highlights
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/do-presidential-polls-break-toward-challengers/
Do Presidential Polls Break Toward Challengers?
By NATE SILVER
But one hypothesis you should find less persuasive is the notion that the polls will break toward Mr. Romney just because he is the challenger. It is often asserted that this is the case â that the polls move toward the âout-partyâ candidate rather than the incumbent. But in my view the empirical evidence â although it is somewhat ambiguous â mostly argues against this idea.
What do we see here? For the most part, the incumbent-party and challenging candidates get a higher share of the vote than they do in the polls, which simply reflects the fact that some number of undecided voter will migrate into their camps.
Perhaps more important, both candidates gain about the same amount of ground relative to the polls. On average since 1968, for instance, the incumbent-party candidate gained 3.5 points between the September polls and his actual performance on Election Day, while the challenger gained 3.9 points.
Most important(And for those who keep repeating that Obama is polling worse then previous incumbents when in fact he is polling much better)
The other anomaly has been in the summer months â June, July and August. In these months, the polls have tended to low ball the position of the incumbent partyâs candidate. In July polls, for instance, the incumbent-party candidate has trailed by an average of 4 points in elections since 1968. However, the incumbent-party candidate has actually won these elections by an average of a little more than 3 points. In other words, there has been a seven-point swing on average toward the incumbent partyâs candidate from the July polls until November.
