There's been a lot of ink spilled about daily tracking polls over the past few weeks, some of it (at least metaphorically speaking) by me. And today, I'm heartily sorry for it.
Let's cut to the chase. Both tracking polls purport to offer a snapshot of the preferences of likely Democratic voters. Here are the numbers from today's reports:
Rasmussen: Clinton 46, Obama 42
Gallup: Clinton 52, Obama 39
The problem is that we ran a controlled experiment yesterday, and discovered that voters are split evenly - really damn evenly. The popular vote aggregate totals for yesterday, apparently, were 50.2% to 49.8%. So Rasmussen skates by, at the very edge of its +/-4% margin of error. Conveniently, I might add, as their margin shrunk dramatically from 47-40% yesterday, but I'll assume they're being honest about it. But Gallup, the supposed gold standard for polling organizations, totally flubs. They're just incredibly far from telling us how voters actually feel.
Wait, I can almost hear you say. What if it's voters in the other 27 states who overwhelmingly back Clinton, and in the 23 who voted yesterday they're evenly split? Funny you should ask. Gallup broke out the Feb. 5 states a couple days ago, and found them, if anything, more supportive of Clinton than the rest.
So Rasmussen, as I've explained before, is erratic and error-prone, even if they barely skate by this time around. (See, for example, their results from CA). But until we get an explanation out of the Gallup folks, anything coming out of that tracking poll - be it an Obama surge or Clinton domination - should be fairly suspect.
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