Obama's Poll Bonaza

I haven't been posting much polling data here, but today warrants an exception.

Things got kicked off this morning by Quinnipiac which showed the following:

FLORIDA: Obama 51, McCain 43
OHIO: Obama 50, McCain 42
PENNSYLVANIA: Obama 54, McCain 39

Staggering numbers to be sure. The McCain campaign panicked about these numbers and attempted to laugh them off.

"These polls are laughable. We hope Obama thinks they’re true. The national tracking is clear: Some polls have us down 2 percent, some 4, some as high as 6. How could you have national numbers like that, but have those kinds of numbers in three of the largest, most competitive states in the country?"

But then, CNN/Time Magazine laid down the smackdown:

FLORIDA: Obama 51, McCain 47
MINNESOTA: Obama 54, McCain 43
MISSOURI: Obama 49, McCain 48
NEVADA: Obama 51, McCain 47
VIRGINIA: Obama 53, McCain 44

These are staggering, staggering numbers. Assuming Obama wins all of John Kerry's states (and really at this point, the only question mark is New Hampshire's 4 Electoral Votes) and Iowa and New Mexico, which everyone assumes he wins, as well as Colorado where he is leading, we're talking about 349 Electoral Votes...

...and we're not even factoring Indiana and North Carolina where the polls are deadlocked, if not showing a slight Obama lead.

The most devastating factor of all is, as far as I can tell, these polls are now talking about likely voters--not registered voters. Likely Voters have usually voted in at least the two last elections, which means that they are disproportionately oversampling older voters, and undersampling younger voters and new registrants.

And I'll give you two guesses on who those groups favor.

What this means is: there is a reasonable assumption that as amazing as these poll numbers are today, they could very well be understating Obama's actual support in these states.

I told you this was worth posting.

For everyone who is panicking over polls

Please also read this:

But, interestingly, all three polls were also conducted using a higher sampling of Republican voters than in July, thus raising a question of methodology.

In a year in which Democrats have a lead of 11 million registered-voters over Republicans, and have been adding to that advantage through a robust field operation, are pollsters over-sampling Republicans?

While McCain is definitely getting a bounce in the polls, pollsters seem to be--at the same time--increasing the number of Republicans that they poll and decreasing the number of Democrats.

Now weighting polls is standard operating procedure, but making this change, while McCain is getting his convention bounce is amplifying the magnitude of this bounce. What is less than clear is if this is a real effect, or artificial.