Now it appears as though Zogby is not forecasting a Bush win afterall.
Personally, I think Zogby is full of it. No candidate picks up 5 points in a single day unless their opponent is caught in bed with an underage hooker or a horse or possibly an underage equine hooker. Zogby’s performance in 2000 was essentially blind luck – the stopped clock being right twice per day. His 2002 polls were less than worthless, and his methodology that applies an artificial partisan balance is laughable. Anyone who assumes that the partisan balance in this country hasn’t changed since 2000 is making a very big assumption – an assumption that is virtually guaranteed to be wrong.
Zogby’s own tracking polls show Bush tied with Kerry today, which certainly doesn’t indicate any major shift with undecided voters. Indeed, even with Zogby likely oversampling Democrats, Kerry can’t maintain any kind of solid lead outside the margin of error. By now if there was going to be any kind of major movement with undecided voters we’d be seeing it. Instead, they appear to be breaking either even or just slightly for Bush.
I’d take London’s odds long before I’d take John Zogby’s…
“No candidate picks up five points in a single day unless they’re caught in bed with an underage hooker..”
Or, hypothetically speaking of course, if the candidate were running against a guy whose statements that Iraqi explosives were stolen before Americans got there were being directly contradicted by a small local news broadcaster in Minneapolis with film footage proving otherwise….or if the opponent was undergoing an FBI investigation for fraud because of underhanded dealings with an oil company in which his running mate was the former CEO and still collects a tidy pension…or if the opponent was making headlines by pulling an advertisement in which he doctored up a photo to make himself look as though he was in a mosh pit of jubilant soldiers. Perhaps an unlikely scenario like this could produce a five-point swing against a candidate in one day…even though Zogby’s swing was only two points in one day.
As for “oversampling Democrats” by 2 or 3 percent (never mind that the Dems have 2 or 3 point party affiliation advantage anyway), it doesn’t seem to be producing any noticeable separation of Zogby from other pollsters who don’t weight their results according to party affiliation….with the exception of Gallup whose likely voter model seems to weight party affiliation with a non-existent seven-point GOP partisan advantage. Of course, you’re perfectly okay with that.