Check the new CBS poll. Polling voters after Sarah’s clutch performance at the debate, McCain/Palin is now within 3 points of Team BarryJo.

Here’s the link [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/06/opinion/polls/main4504633.shtml]

Keep on charging! McCain/Palin supporters have nothing to lose by going all our. Our guy fought for his country. Their guy had summits with known terrorists as recently as 1995.

http://www.gop.com/News/NewsRead.aspx?Guid=768aa784-72f3-4b43-acb6-c5fe81d901cd

Our guy is the most qualified candidate. Period.

Their guy is a lot of psychobabble fluff. Psychobabble has yet to win a single war. And our enemies do want to kill Americans. Barry may not believe it. He may even have a few terrorists as friends. But they are planning to hit Europe, hit Israel, hit the U.S., and hit every democracy in the world that doesn’t bend the knee to their god.

Please, for the love of our great country, do not quit now!

Many of you have spent the last 9 days following a predictable sequence of denial, anger, blame-throwing, and despair. You’re old enough and smart enough to know when a candidate has turned into a dog and McCain, you say, is a dog.

I disagree. And I’ll tell you why.

If McCain’s support could be measured accurately by opinion polls, I would join you in your pity-party. McCain wasn’t my favorite Republican in the brutal primary campaign this year, Mitt Romney was. But I still saw the enormous differences between McCain and his democratic rivals and I held out hope and belief that McCain would triumph in November.

Since the GOP Convention, I’ve watched McCain’s campaign drop precipitously in the polls. We’ve all known that Obama’s poll numbers are juiced. But we assumed that this would only account for a 2%-3% advantage, not a 7% to 10% advantage.

I’ve already explored how Obama’s poll numbers gave his New Hampshire supporters a false sense of security (see my last diary, entitled “Poll Junkies: Please Check Out this Review of the 2004 Election”).

Now I will show you how McCain’s poll numbers are deceptively low even as Obama’s are deceptively high.

Exhibit A: the 2008 California Republican Primary

McCain wasn’t expected to win this one convincingly. The polls showed him leading Romney by 1% or trailing Romney by up to 7%. He ended up beating my candidate, the Mittster, by 7%. Depending on which polls you believe, that’s a 6% to 14% swing.

Compare McCain’s results with the polls taken during the last six days before the California Republican Primary:

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How Much Should We Trust Polls?

Sept. 20, 2008

Summary: On November 1, 2004, the day before the election, polls showed Kerry winning comfortably. The polls in 2004 all over-sampled Democratic voters in every single battleground state. There seem to be a significant percentage of people who vote Republican but either don’t like talking to pollsters or don’t have time to talk to pollsters.

Obama should listen to the “hand-wringers” in his party. Any state where polls show him with a lead of 1% to 4% should be considered a toss-up at best, or, more likely (due to the Bradley effect) “leaning McCain”.

From Rolling Stone Magazine (June, 2006):

On the evening of the [2004] vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to call. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states — including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida — and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000. ”Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,” a Fox News analyst declared, ”or George Bush loses.”

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show … disparities — as much as 9.5 percent — with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.

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