Apparently Bush got a pretty big bounce from his convention.

You guys think this double digit lead will hold up? Or will it be neck and neck at election time?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/campaign_time_poll_dc

Your link is timing out for me, but I'm guessing this is the 52/41 ( or close ) from Time. I don't put much faith in polls, but a couple of quick notes.

1) This is one of many polls. No other poll that I've seen has such a big spread.

2) Most likely, no poll that came out today could measure convention bounce. At best, a poll coming out today would maybe be a snapshot of opinion through Wednesday. It generally takes a poll a day to make adjustments for different demographics in their sample size ( If you randomly contact 1100 people and 60% of the respondents end up being Laotian union workers, you have to weigh that down )

3) Polls are generally conducted over 3 to 4 days. That means 66% to 75% of the respondents probably responded before Bush's speech.

Calm down, I'm sure you are going to see poll numbers to make you giddy soon enough. If you really want a general idea of how things are going, wait until Sunday and average the more reputable polls together ( pollingreport.com can help with that ). But the only poll that matters is Nov 2.

( as an aside, if Time used the same SRBI group for this poll as their past few, I question it as it highly favors males over females. A female can only respond if there is no voting age male in the household when they call )

Fil

Fil's pretty much right. And you also have to watch between "likely" voters and "registered" voters polling. Registered have always given Kerry a better advantage to date.

Polls suck though, and Kerry has come from way behind in all of his races I think. I've said before that Bush is going to win by 5%+ but the polls on Nov 1 are going to be even. It just makes for good news if its a close race.

A point to be made however is that Kerry got no bounce in any poll, yet Bush did..add in the good report on the economy and unemployment for August..and then add in further how Kerry responds to a speech about domestic and foreign policies with more Vietnam material(at midnight no less, and I won't even go into how he invented them attacking his patriotism)..

Basically you have Kerry looking desperate as hell, and Bush looking better than he did before the convention.

If Kerry doesn't start knuckling down and sticking to current issues instead of Vietnam he is through.

Pollingreport shows them still dead even. The main reason neither group really saw a bounce is that 90% of the people polled are already decided this early in the game, unlike most other years.

Anyone got any good sites for keeping up with the polls?

Acctually Kelraz, Pollingreport shows Bush with a 10 point lead atm among likely voters and an 8 point lead among registered voters. Kivorn, probably the best thing to do is goto google and type in something like "2004 election polls" and try and look at the bigger sites / average of all the polls.

Edit: Also when looking at polls make sure that they are up to date, aka from september, not from August or July. Think you were looking the the August poll from pollingreport Kelraz since in August they were listed as a tie.

My one roomate works for the National Journal here in DC and spends 95% of his time analyzing the election polls. General consensus thus far is that you average out all the polls and they are still dead even. Newsweek and Times may have reported big bounces, but others reported losses. My oppinion is that polls are pretty much bullshit too, and I think that this race will stay close and the only real poll that matters is the one they take in November. Times and Newsweek polled registered voters and not likely voters too, doesn't matter if someone says they would have voted for the guy but then turn around and say they probably won't vote.

A large portion of people are left out of polls too, people that traditionally don't vote in the past but because of the importance of the election are getting far more interested this year. That includes college students (generally liberal) and the elderly (generally conservative).

To summarize, the college students just gotta get motivated and we gotta hope the elderly all die off before the election.

the college students just gotta get motivated and we gotta hope the elderly all die off before the election.
EEEEVIL :p

Anyway, are those polls nationwide? because really it doesnt matter how many points anyone is ahead if the bulk of the votes gained are in already safe States, say Bush gaining even more ground in Texas. What is the situation in Florida?

Usually the canidate winning the popular vote is winning in 2/3 or all of the the 3 crucial important swing states which are Florida, Ohio, and Pennslyvania. The canidate who wins 2 out of 3 of those states in November will most likely be our next President. The popular vote usually reflects onto the electoral vote. Bush only lost the popular vote by something like 0.1% last time, if he lost the popular vote by more than 5% he would not have won in places such as Florida and Ohio and would have lost the election.

Let's just hope it's not college professers motivating the students to go out vote since we all know who lines the pockets of the teachers union. 8/

Anyone got any good sites for keeping up with the polls?

http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Once again ... my favorite....