The race evens out

Obama supporters may be lulled into a false sense of confidence by the good polling news of the past week. McCain is now eating into those gains reestablishing the race as a toss-up with Obama winning the status quo barely.

The bad news for Obama is that national poll gains haven't translated into significant electoral college gains. True, Obama now has a slight edge in all-important Colorado and has significantly closed the gap in Nevada, Virginia and North Carolina. But McCain has made substantial progress in Minnesota and Pennsylvania while retaining leads in Ohio, Florida and New Hampshire.

The Daily Kos poll shows a 6% national lead for Obama which, if true, would reflect a huge election day victory for Obama. But a critique of that poll suggests democrats have been oversampled. The critique further suggests polls based on registered voters (RVs) as opposed to likely voters (LVs) will falsely favor democrats. This eliminates all polls except for Battleground and Rasmussen which average a 1% McCain lead. Not good.

Rasmussen has adjusted their polling sample to give Dems another .4% advantage in sampling which Rasmussen now cites as 5.5%. The direction of this gap is a positive development, but the size of the gap (i.e. the 5.5%) shouldn't hearten dems too much since recent reports suggest racism constitutes a 6% deficit for Obama and Republicans typically show up at the polls in higher numbers than dems.

Keep pushing.