Tonight I continue my monitoring of the two families of polls being produced this year by pollsters in order to provide our readers insight into how the presidential race is playing out based on two  different assumptions on turnout models. The tracking polls in the ‘traditional’ family use historic voting trends to weight things like […]

Later tonight I will be doing the second “Nightly Bi-Poller Report” and it will be an interesting post because Gallup has come out today with a stunning poll for their ‘traditional’ (i.e., historically proven) turnout model: Even Gallup’s fanciful ‘Extended’ turnout model took a huge dip. The electorate is giving me gray hairs, but they […]

Pew has come out with another one of those fanciful polls assuming a never before seen historic edge in Democrat turnout models.  The bottom line is Pew has Obama up 15% nationally, but to pull this off Obama needs to see Democrats turnout ahead of conservatives and the GOP by a crazy 39%-24% edge – […]

Well, since I noticed there are two families of polls out there, and only one family will be proven right next Wednesday, I have decided to take the RCP average for the national polls and split it into the “traditional” poll of polls and the “extended” poll of polls. My original posts on what the […]

Last week Senator Obama came to Northern Virginia – Leesburg to be exact. There he pulled a crowd of 10,000 people (though almost half left before he was even done speaking?). Today Governor Sarah Palin came to Leesburg, VA and also pulled a crowd of 10,000 people. A picture of the event this cold autumn […]

Reader Frogg passed along this really interesting commentary from a professional pollster who is (a) a die hard Obama supporter and (b) laughing at the public polls: I was having dinner a night ago with a friend of mine who is a statistician for a well-regarded private polling company. They do some work for Republicans […]

Jay Cost posted a good tutorial on the mathematics of polls, but left one case out where statistical models start to show two different possible outcomes. These are called bimodal results, where there is no consensus on a single result, but actually two highly probably results are possible. A graph of a bimodal statistical model […]

Something big is happening in Northern Virginia. I have been out of the country for a week and I came back home to the place I was born, raised and where I raised my family to find I did not recognize it. The area has become obsessed with the presidential election! There are signs everywhere […]

Update: Seems this was all a lie. Sorry folks, but I was traveling 12 hours before I could get to a point to make the update. Obama asked his followers to go out and get “in their face”, speaking of independents and McCain-Palin supporters. We know the leftward fevered swamps can be a trashy place […]

Clearly this year the pollsters don’t have a consensus. Some show a growing lead for Obama, others his lead shrinking to a tie. I still think by the time election day rolls by there will be a clear trend one way or the other. But for those looking for optimistic news there are polls out […]