Lots of polls today, as promised yesterday. Seventeen in all. Zogby has released polls in 16 battleground states and Survey USA has a very surprising one in Maryland, showing Bush and Kerry tied at 48% each. Up until now Maryland has been strongly Democratic. It remains to be seen if this result is confirmed by other pollsters.
Of the 16 battleground states, Zogby has Kerry ahead in 11 and Bush ahead in 5. Since I round the numbers to integers, my result is 9 states for Kerry, 5 states for Bush, with Florida, and Arkansas tied, even though Kerry is fractionally ahead in both. The net effect is that Kerry has closed the gap in the electoral college from a Bush lead of 116 yesterday to only 17 today, a net gain of 99 votes in the electoral college.
How did this happen? Kerry picked up Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for a net gain of 76 electoral votes, Bush lost 33 in Arkansas and Florida, and Kerry lost 10 in Maryland. The other states polled didn't switch candidates. But as usual, note that states with a white core on the map are essentially tossups, no matter what color the border is.
What is becoming apparently over time is that Zogby polls tend to favor Kerry, Gallup and Strategic Vision vision polls tend to favor Bush, and the rest are somewhere in between. It is more likely that different methodologies are at work here than that somebody has his thumb on the scale. Gallup normalizes the number of Republicans in the sample to 40%. Zogby doesn't normalize for party preference at all. All of them correct for gender, age, race, and some other factors. Also, the pollsters differ in how they determine likely voters. The conclusion is seems to matter which pollster you use. I will continue to use them all unless they are caught red-handed with their hands in the cookie jar.
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