A Zogby poll on the recent presidential contest, summarized by Flopping Aces, serves as a serious indictment of the media’s reporting on the presidential election:

57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)

81.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)

82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)

88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)

56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).

And yet…..

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes

Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter

And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her “house,” even though that was Tina Fey who said that

We’ve noted the media’s “squeals of delight” at their candidate’s victory, and the “thrill” they get when they hear their man speak. We have observed their “giddy boosterism” and the self-admitted slanted coverage of the election among the elite media. We have on occasion remarked on the outright journalistic malpractice on display in the media’s coverage of the campaign. This Zogby poll indicates that the media’s performance was even worse than all that. What’s still up in the air is the price to be paid for the one-sidedness of this coverage, and who in the end will end up paying that price.

Paul Mirengoff commented today that “this year’s presidential election came down to two questions: first, do we want major change and second, which candidate will provide it. Both questions proved fairly easy for the electorate to answer in the end: it wanted significant change and believed that Obama, not McCain, would provide it.” Frank Rich catalogued a few of the changes among the electorate last week in a helpfully footnoted column:

The most conspicuous clichés to fall…were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.

Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.

And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.

Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).

Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.

In mid-October, the NYT reported “a record 89 percent of Americans now say the country has pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track while just 7 percent of Americans say the country is going in the right direction.” In some ways, it seems remarkable in retrospect that 46% of voters (58MM people) actually voted for John McCain.

Pollster Kellyanne Conway observed this about the election:

In two self-identification questions, just 33% of actual voters said they considered themselves Republicans, but 41% thought of themselves as conservatives. On the other end of the spectrum, 39% aligned as Democrats, but just 20% described their ideological alignment as liberal. That number is unchanged from the 20% of actual voters in our 2004 Post-Election survey said they were liberal.

Something in these numbers appears to be out of whack. For example, in a poll last year, 34% of Democrats said that they personally did not want the surge to work, and, in 2005, fully 32% of Democrats said that the US is “discriminatory and unfair.” Only 20% of those polled called themselves liberal. Is personally not wanting the US military to succeed in the surge anything other than a liberal position? What’s going on?

This fellow has a very interesting analysis of the accuracy of pre-election polls that will either vanish down the memory hole quickly or become something to be pondered at leisure in the coming days. Meanwhile there’s this from US News:

I just talked to one of my best Team McCain sources who told me that heading into today all the key battleground polls were moving hard and fast in their direction. The source, hardly a perma-optimist, thinks it will be a long night, but that McCain is going to win. So add this with the new Battleground poll (Obama +1.9 only) and the rising stock market…

On the other hand, John Dickerson says: “An Obama loss would mean the majority of pundits, reporters, and analysts were wrong. Pollsters would have to find a new line of work, since Obama has been ahead in all 159 polls taken in the last six weeks. The massive crowds that have regularly turned out to see Obama would turn out to have meant nothing.” We’ll know soon who is right.

Can 8.7% of voters still be undecided this close to election day? We’ll know tomorrow.

Early voting in Los Angeles county used to be a breeze. There were touch-screen locations throughout the city, but that came to an end in 2007. Now there is but one place to cast an early ballot, a government building about 15 miles southeast of downtown.

It takes a certain amount of fortitude to vote early in LA this year. The process can consume 3-4 hours, exclusive of travel time. When we went yesterday afternoon, there was an long line just to get into the official waiting area. In there, a large tent with rows of folding chairs that seat 500 people or more, poll workers give out strips of paper with three digits. You get to vote when your number is called. Our guess is that maybe 400 people an hour vote. (Our advice is: bring a book; we read the entire novel Rebecca while waiting.)

It was an interesting demographic mix. Though there were a few more young people than we expected, the crowd seemed to be mostly in their 30’s and 40’s. Some people brought their young kids. Perhaps half the voters were African Americans (apologies to La Shawn Barber). The crowd seemed less Hispanic than LA is generally. (Our demographic was a bit underrepresented.) The atmosphere was friendly and somewhat subdued. It was a little like waiting in church for a very long time for the service to begin.

Occasionally there was a bit of joking. Once in a while someone would say Bingo! or otherwise celebrate when the woman calling out numbers finally ended some voter’s long wait. There was quite a lot of laughter when the announcer called out “666,” but otherwise people were quiet or chatted in low voices.

There was a freak thunderstorm in the middle of the afternoon, a very unusual occurrence in LA, where the rainy season doesn’t begin for another month. People continued to wait in the long line in the rain, with or without umbrellas.

We suppose that it would be hard to generalize from voting in Los Angeles, a blue city in a very blue state. But early voting in LA this year required an extra amount of commitment and intensity, because it killed a whole day. Senator Obama seemed to be the beneficiary of this commitment and intensity, at least in Los Angeles. We saw nothing to suggest that the polls are not correct.

Zogby’s current polling data suggest an Obama “blowout,” similar to Reagan’s victory over Carter:

time is running short for McCain. These numbers, if they hold, are blowout numbers. They fit the 1980 model with Reagan’s victory over Carter — but they are happening 12 days before Reagan blasted ahead. If Obama wins like this we can be talking not only victory but realignment: he leads by 27 points among Independents, 27 points among those who have already voted, 16 among newly registered voters, 31 among Hispanics, 93%-2% among African Americans, 16 among women, 27 among those 18-29, 5 among 30-49 year olds, 8 among 50-64s, 4 among those over 65, 25 among Moderates, and 12 among Catholics (which is better than Bill Clinton’s 10-point victory among Catholics in 1996). He leads with men by 2 points, and is down among whites by only 6 points, down 2 in armed forces households, 3 among investors, and is tied among NASCAR fans.

We have no idea if these numbers are correct or not, but certain of them look a little odd. A footnote on the methodology of the poll sheds very little light on what the poll’s internals actually look like.

In this NYT/CBS poll has a big Obama lead, 53-39%, a whopping 14 point margin, and of course it might be true. Senator Obama is said to look plenty presidential these days.

However, there are several internals in the poll that raise questions about its accuracy. For example, the poll says that 17% of its respondents didn’t vote in 2004, when turnout was by far at an all time record, and that is curious indeed. That aspect of the current poll would appear to be suspect, unless there are an extraordinary number of new voters this November, which remains to be seen. Moreover, the D/R split was 36-28%, which one would think would generate a +8% for any Democrat from the get-go. We’re not saying the poll is wrong; we don’t know. But how could any Democrat not do very well in this poll, given the sample selected?

Apparently the Palin-Biden debate was must-see TV:

Thursday’s debate was…
– 33% higher than Friday’s top-of-the-ticket debate between John McCain and Barack Obama (52.4 million).
– 61% higher than the 2004 vp debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards (43.6 million).
– 23% higher than the 1984 match up between George Bush and Geraldine Ferrarro (56.7 million), the former title-holder for the most-watched vp debate.

The Biden-Palin summit was expected to overthrow Friday’s presidential debate in viewers due to questions about Palin’s readiness and because the vp match was held on a Thursday — television’s most-watched night of the week. But this ratings blowout exceeds industry expectations. The audience response puts the election back onto the historic and record-breaking ratings territory that characterized the convention coverage.

The Nielsen measurement includes viewers watching the debate live on 11 networks — NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS, CNN, Fox News, CSPAN, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and Telefutura.

ABC drew the largest debate audience with 13.1 million viewers. Among broadcast networks, ABC was followed by NBC (12.8 million), CBS (11.1 million) and Fox (4.5 million).

On cable, Fox News led with 11.1 million — the most-watched telecast in the network’s 12-year history. CNN drew 10.7 million, the channel’s third most-watched telecast ever. MSNBC had 4.4 million. In addition, PBS projects 3.5 million viewers watched its coverage. Friday night may have been the most-watched debate since Reagan vs. Carter (80.6 million). The total from last night is 69,989,000 viewers.

Palin seems to be willing to go after Senator Obama harder than McCain (via Fox): “Some of his comments that he has made about the war that I think may in my world disqualifies someone from consideration as the next commander in chief…Some of his comments about Afghanistan and what we are doing there supposedly -– just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That’s reckless.” Governor Palin would appear possibly once again have made it John McCain’s race to win or lose.

Unlike the first debate of 2004, it is unclear to us who won last night’s contest. A Democrat weighted poll said Obama won. A Republican weighted poll said it was McCain. Frank Luntz said on TV that his focus group preferred Obama because McCain seemed old and lacked passion. Others thought McCain looked good, even on HDTV. TIME Magazine canonized Senator Obama.

Apparently a lot more Democrats than Republicans (by a 3:2 margin) watched the debate, which is interesting, but we’re not sure what it means. Neither side appears to have lost this rather tepid affair. Obama committed a gaffe, but it’s hard to see that anyone will care very much about it. We noticed Obama’s suddenly gray hair for the first time.

If one major purpose of the debates is for the American people to answer “Who do you want to see in your home on TV every night?”, then the first debate did not clarify the matter too much. But there are more debates to come. We note that the same pundit who declared John Kerry the definitive winner of the first debate in 2004 thought that Bush had turned it around by the third debate and declared that “this election is over.” So perhaps we’ll just have to stay tuned and see what happens in the coming days.

UPDATE — The more we think about the debate, the more we appreciate Senator Obama’s apparent strategy of making himself look like a safe and noncontroversial choice for undecided voters by, among other things, agreeing with Senator McCain on many issues, and even invoking (incorrectly) Henry Kissinger, a name with meaning only to older voters. Whether it works remains to be seen.

Dick Morris thinks that Senator McCain is doing a terrible job in his run against Senator Obama:

When is the McCain campaign going to get serious? It seems to be marking time with softball ads, more appropriate to the soundbites campaign media spokespeople exchange with one another than to strategic paid media hits. One ad talks about how the media loves Obama. Another mocks him as a celebrity. Each throws pitty-pat punches, far short of the kind of knockout blows one would expect from a presidential campaign. Were I a donor to McCain’s campaign, paying for these pathetic spots, I would demand a refund. Or sue for malpractice…

Are the McCain people waiting for September to get serious? If so, they are making a big mistake and missing an important opportunity. History indicates that the best time to beat a new candidate is in the summer. August to be precise.

Dukakis, Mondale, and Kerry all were destroyed in the summer, long before the fall campaign began. In 1984, the offensive against Geraldine Ferraro crippled Mondale well before Labor Day. In 1988, the pledge of allegiance, revolving door, and Willie Horton ads all ran in the summer. Dukakis was dead by September. And the swift boat attack on Kerry defeated him well before the summer was over.

McCain needs to make voters afraid of Obama. Not, as he suggests self-servingly, by emphasizing that he “doesn’t look like all the other presidents on dollar bills,” but by hitting him on the two fronts where it would really hurt — the economy and national security. Obama’s inexperience and the wildly liberal proposals he has made in his primary campaigning, both set him up for a crippling blow this month.

Perhaps Morris is correct. But it seems to us that Senator McCain might actually be doing a pretty good job of preparing the battlefield for the fall election. One of the first of his ads mocked the media’s mad crush on Obama, which might put them on the defensive if they had any shame. Subsequent ads compared the Democratic candidate to nitwit girl celebrities, and parodied his messianic pretensions by using the candidate’s own words. To the extent that the ads are effective, they are effective, in our view, because they amplify true things about the candidate, namely, his celebrity appeal and his grandiosity.

So the underlying messages of these ads have been that you can’t trust the media, and that Senator Obama is a pretentious windbag and a lightweight. Perhaps Morris is correct, and McCain should be attacking Obama more substantively. But portraying Obama as a fellow you shouldn’t take too seriously, whatever he says, might be a useful way for McCain to prepare for the fall. In any event, it’s hard to argue with success, and Senator McCain is certainly doing well against his opponent at the moment. Indeed, Roger Simon wonders if Senator McCain might be peaking too soon.

Addendum: Morris is wrong in his characterization of the Kerry campaign, by the way. Senator Kerry’s campaign was not destroyed “in the summer.” It is true that Kerry’s campaign was pretty badly hurt in August and September by the SwiftBoatVets, Christmas in Cambodia, and other such gaffes. But Senator Kerry’s excellent performance in the first debate, where President Bush stumbled around, brought him back strongly. Indeed, the third debate, in mid-October, was said to be do-or-die for the Bush campaign. People forget how effective the Kerry campaign actually was.

Those who argue against an urgent expansion of oil exploration because it would not have an impact for many years are unwittingly making an argument to drill now. The US imports nearly 70% of its oil, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds a mere 35 days of US oil needs. That is a dangerous situation for a so-called superpower to be in. Taking swift steps towards greater energy independence is not just a sensible economic policy, but should be a critical military and strategic priority for the nation and all Americans, regardless of political party.

For example, if the Strait of Hormuz were shut for any extended period of time, the US economy, and the warmaking capability of the US could be crippled. (What would happen if the Persian Gulf were irradiated or the largest Saudi fields disabled, for example?) Such a disaster would be far less likely to happen if our dependence on foreigners for energy were relatively modest, but that is not the case.

The opponents of offshore and ANWR drilling argue that the US cannot materially increase its conventional energy supplies in the short term. That means that the Congress’s failure to act now to increase supplies over the longer term is an act of irresponsibility and gross negligence of stunning proportions. America’s dependence on foreigners who wish us harm will only get worse if current trends continue. If Middle East oil supplies are disrupted at some point, certainly a plausible scenario given Iran’s nuclear program, the inquiry into Pearl Harbor would look like a picnic by comparison.

The price of gas makes drilling a popular policy today, according to all the polls. That is fortunate, since it provides an excuse for Congress to act on a usually latent matter of the utmost strategic importance. This problem may have been invisible when oil was $60 a barrel, but it is not invisible now. Not to act today would likely come to be seen as the greatest act of political negligence in our lifetimes if one of the disruptions above actually occurs.

The Democratic presidential candidate moves toward supporting offshore drilling, no doubt because his party’s position on the issue has hurt him in the polls. Note the evident lack of enthusiasm in Senator Obama’s revised position. AP:

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices…If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage — I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.”

Question: Does this mean the messiah has lost his power and this was not “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Once again, America’s military is the preeminent US institution in the hearts and minds of the American people. That is no surprise. The surprise is how low Congress has fallen. Gallup has a poll that once again shows the military to be the most respected profession or institution in the United States, with 71% of Americans saying they have a high level of confidence in that group, as opposed to 26% in the Presidency and a startlingly low 12% having such confidence in Congress:

When we looked at these statistics a while back, confidence in the Presidency was much higher at 44%, and that figure has now fallen by over a third to 26%. Congress, at that time controlled by the GOP, was also held in low esteem in the previous poll, with a 22% rating. Now that has fallen almost in half. Congress now gets a mere 12% confidence rating, the largest percentage decline among all institutions.

12% confidence in Congress is a very disturbing statistic. Congress and news about Congress are omnipresent in daily life and the leaders of congress are staples of network news. It would not have been terribly surprising to see Congress’s decline mirroring that of TV news, which fell from the high 20s to the low 20s in the surveys — but confidence in Congress plummeted by twice as much. No doubt Democrats and Republicans will have different spins to attach to the institutional decline of Congress. Our question is this: how much additional power would you want to see in the hands of an institution that is held in low esteem by 80-90% of the American people?

The UK Guardian says the Senator Obama is “limping” to the finish line in the Democratic primary season. The New York Times has him “wheezing” as he crosses the tape to become the Democratic nominee. If current trends hold, he could have potentially enough delegates to claim the nomination in the next week or two, but that is not clear at this point

Senator Clinton still has the greatest number of votes in the primaries and caucuses, but the media cut her no slack. She and her allies can point to their fairly compelling demographic arguments, but to no avail, and, increasingly, to no notice. The left in the Democratic Party, and more importantly, the media have made their choice and there’s no stopping them now.

Our view is that Senator Clinton is the stronger candidate against Senator McCain in the general election. Senator Obama seems to have peaked in February, and it remains to be seen if the herculean efforts of the MSM can prop him up all the way through the long months until November. But perhaps that is a mischaracterization. Perhaps the MSM don’t really have their work cut out for them at all.

Perhaps America and Americans have changed. Maybe they want to try a new Age of Foolishness on for size by electing such an inexperienced but glib fellow (Scott Johnson uses a different term at the end of this piece). Perhaps the slow motion train wreck of Senator Obama’s chruchgoing and churchleaving (or was that grandma, not a train?) will not be seen by voters as a relevant insight into the man’s judgment. Perhaps that he is a “peacenik by gut” who has poor instincts when it comes to dealing with adversaries will be seen as irrelevant in November. Perhaps his blessedness will carry him to victory. Or maybe America just wants change, no matter what, instead of more grumpy old men (actually, the Grumpy Old Men promise foolish change too). One way or another, it looks like we’re going to find out.

Richard Baehr points to some polling problems of the likely Democratic presidential candidate:

In 1992 and 1996 Bill Clinton won Kentucky, West Virginia and Arkansas. In 2000 and 2004, George Bush won all three states. In the current Democratic Party nominating contest, Hillary Clinton won all three states by huge margins — 30 points or more in each case. West Virginia (3%), and Kentucky (7%) have relatively small black populations. Arkansas is just over 15% African American (in the same range as Florida and Tennessee).

The three states have 19 Electoral College votes among them, almost as many as Ohio (20). In 2004, Bush won the Electoral College by 286-252. Had he lost Ohio, Kerry would have been elected. In 2008, Ohio will undoubtedly be a battleground again.

Were the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the Democrats would be in very good shape even without Ohio. That is because current surveys show Hillary Clinton winning all three states by solid margins over John McCain. But John McCain trounces Barack Obama in the same three states by over 20% in each case. So with Clinton as the nominee, these states vote as they did when her husband was the nominee. When Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, these states vote as they did when George Bush was running.

The differences in the poll results are shocking. Clinton wins Arkansas and Kentucky by 14% and 9% respectively. McCain wins against Obama in the two states by 25% and 24% respectively. This means the shift from Obama to Clinton is a change of over 34% margin in one state, 38% in the other. Roughly 40% of the voters who are for Clinton will not support Obama in these two states.

Perhaps Bill Clinton wasn’t just blowing smoke in his recent comments on the same subject.

A report from Salon from a Democrat, calling into question the electability of Senator Obama, until recently an article of faith among Democrats versus Senator Clinton:

the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live. And that could mean trouble for the fall.

The primary in West Virginia, a very rural state, was a blowout. Clinton won it by 41 percent, and she won all 55 counties. Similarly, in rural Ohio she beat Obama by 33 percent. In Pennsylvania, a much more metropolitan state, she won 56 of the state’s 63 counties, including Allegheny, Appalachia’s most populous county, where Pittsburgh is located. Her margins in the rural Appalachian counties of western Pennsylvania were West Virginia-size.

Still, when you look at the earlier aggregate rural vote on Super Tuesday, the preference for Clinton is clearly not confined to Appalachia. Combining the results from 22 diverse states in the Northeast, South, Midwest and West on Feb. 5, Clinton beat Obama 55 percent to 38 percent among rural voters, according to an analysis in DailyYonder.com, the news Web site of the organization I head, the Center for Rural Strategies. Those aren’t West Virginia margins, but they aren’t close. They shine a light on a vulnerability that Democrats have shared through the last several election cycles.

The reality is that when Democratic candidates run competitively in rural America, they win national elections. And when they get creamed in rural America, they lose.

Tuesday Senator Clinton beat Senator Obama by 35 points, 65-30 in Kentucky. Well see whether the historic pattern holds in November.

Jay Cost says the party’s not quite over, and has some very interesting analysis of the demographics of West Virginia and Kentucky to back up the scenario he outlines:

What happens to “It’s Over” if Clinton pulls a 40-point victory in West Virginia on Tuesday, then follows it up a week later with a 30-point victory in Kentucky? If these states turn out in the same margins that states since March 4th have averaged, that would imply a net of about 290,000 votes for Clinton. That puts her within striking distance of a reasonable popular vote victory. “Over” will be over as we turn our attention to Puerto Rico.

There are good reasons not to take Puerto Rico lightly, even though the press has continued to do exactly that. I would note: (a) Puerto Ricans vote in large numbers (2 million in the last gubernatorial election); (b) Puerto Ricans have never had this important a role in United States presidential politics; (c) Puerto Rico’s politics is focused at least partially on how (if at all) to adjust its relationship with the United States; (d) Puerto Rico’s is an open primary, and the residents of the Commonwealth, who are United States citizens, do not see themselves as Republicans or Democrats.

The inference I draw is that Puerto Ricans could turn out in huge numbers. If they do, and they swing for Clinton in a sizeable way, the popular vote lead could swing, too. Add 290,000 votes from West Virginia and Kentucky to 250,000 votes from Puerto Rico, account for expected losses in Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota, and you get Clinton leading in many popular vote counts, some of which are really quite valid. If she has one of those leads when the final votes are counted on June 3rd, the race will go on to the convention.

Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer, among many others, has an obituary for the Clinton campaign.

A CBS/NYT poll shows a big rebound for Senator Obama following his recent denunciation of his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The poll says Obama now leads John McCain 51/41. That would appear to be a big boost to Senator Obama as Indiana and North Carolina go to vote today.

Curiously, however, in a poll in which religious issues are important, the poll appears to undersample religious people. People who attend church at least once a week were 41% of the electorate in both 2000 and 2004. Such people formed only 26% of the sample in the CBS poll. Churchgoers are seemingly underrepresented in a poll about politics and church by over a third. How reliable can the results of such a poll be?

Moreover, people who attend church at least once a week broke 65/35 for George Bush in 2000 and 2004. Undersampling this large and highly relevant demographic group would appear on the surface to call into question the poll’s validity, and make it look like an ad for Senator Obama. Is anyone surprised?

The new CBS / NYT poll shows that 81% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, possibly so high because of gas prices. That’s not all that much of a surprise. The same poll shows both Obama and Clinton beating McCain by 47/42 and 48/43 respectively. That is something of a surprise, given that the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls have McCain comfortably ahead of either Democrat.

Perhaps the CBS / NYT results are not surprising, given that the sample is skewed almost 3:2 Democrat to Republican, with fully 41% of the respondents Democrat and a mere 26% GOP. That’s the highest percentage of Democrats selected by the pollsters in any CBS / NYT poll in the last 15 years, and contrasts with a nearly even split around the time of the 2004 election.

The takeaway from the Times’ polling story appeared to be this line that summarized the “wrong track” findings of the poll: “The unhappiness presents clear risks for Republicans in this year’s elections, given the continued unpopularity of President Bush.” Time will tell if the current D:R sample estimates have any merit, or were contrived for their news manufacturing value.