Vacuous Innumerate Narcissistic Hacks; Or, the Beltway Media
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008Since I devoted far, far more words than Dick Morris deserves last week to dousing the Dickster’s fatuous column about a supposedly tied race between the presidential candidates, it would behoove me to point out that a trend towards McCain over the last couple of weeks is discernible at this point, as reflected in both FiveThirtyEight’s analysis and the rolling average of polls, both of which are converging on a 2 point Obama lead. By the same token, the notion that the race is tied remains spurious.1 For these reasons, as well as those adduced in my prior post, I would caution Obama supporters that today’s Ras poll showing Obama ahead in Florida, and yesterday’s Ras poll showing McCain ahead in Ohio, are considerably more likely to be statistical noise than accurate representations of the conditions of either state race. (Indeed, outlying surveys ought to dampen confidence in Ras’s accuracy as against other pollster — not that Ras is particularly bad (or good), but rather that the field of polling is so fraught with error that an individual survey is a nigh-on-worthless datum.) Not that that is going to deter partisans from trumpeting the results they like or ignoring the results they don’t.