North Carolina poll and the dead cat bounce
Posted by Peter W. Schramm
This Gallup/CNN poll of North Carolina cannot be good news for the Kerry-Edwards ticket: Bush 56, Kerry 41 (likely voters); Bush 51, Kerry 44 (registered voters). Gallup has a review of what kind of bounce candidates have gotten historically, but Realclearpolitics makes all this a bit clearer (and calls Kerry non-bounce a "dead cat" bounce) and reminds us that polls only start being meaningful after Labor Day.
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nor can it be terrible news either. No democrat has any expectation that K-E are going to be close in NC. On the other hand, all of the national polls (AP excepted) showing K-E with a 2-4 lead will probably comfort them somewhat.
Concentrating on polls of this kind makes little sense. The polls mentioned here are those which sample the US population, which does not model the electoral vote well at all. The sensible way to gauge the upcoming election is to look at samples of 50 populations and then construct the corresponding confidence intervals. The last time I looked(couple of days ago), Kerry had a lead of over 60 electoral votes. I suspect that Rove, Card, and the other Bush spin doctors are well aware of this.