A few polls out today show the race tightening, with McCain snatching a 3 point lead in the daily Gallup tracking poll. Rasmussen shows a 48-48 tie. I think it’s always worth taking the daily polls with a grain of salt, and as Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has said, they focus on metrics not incorporated in daily polls like voter turnout and undecideds in 18 “key states.” Some analysis from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.
Still, we just don’t know in what direction the polls are going to move from here forward. There just isn’t any precedent for so many political molecules being packed into such a tight space, with the conventions and VP selections having come right on top of one another. If one assumes that the Republicans are getting a typical 6 or 7-point convention bounce, that suggests that the race still probably leans by a a couple of points to Barack Obama once the polls return to equilibrium, the current numbers representing some sort of short-lived, dead cat bounce along the lines of what happened to Walter Mondale in 1984. If, on the other hand, one assumes that both parties have had their say and that these polls already represent the new equilibrium, things are looking up for McCain-Palin. The truth, of course, is most likely somewhere in between. Our tracking graph still regards Barack Obama as roughly a 3-point favorite, but it is designed to respond cautiously to new information. If McCain sustains these numbers over the course of the next week or so, it will shift toward him relatively rapidly.
UPDATE: To use a Joe Biden word, but correclty, literally moments after I published this Nate Silver added considerably more commentary on the polls pointing out why reading to deeply into daily polling is not prudent. In particular, he has the insight of noting that “political time” is far more relative a notion than the actual passage of days on a calendar. That is, the RNC is still the salient event on voters minds. The bad news is that it’s likely to expect to see this “bounce” sustain so long as the RNC remians fresh. The good news is that the story will change at some point. There will be another revelatory event, a debate, Palin’s upcoming interview (I can has gaffe plz?), etc. that will expose the capriciousness of daily polls. Of course, it’s also possible that an event could go in McCain’s favor, so let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope Palin commits some awful gaffe in her upcoming interview with Charlie Gibson.
