It was McCain's photo-op in the cheese aisle of the grocery store, obviously.....

it is most likely paranoia with numbers.

The American public has ended its love affair with Obama and come back to its senses...like the wandering husband in the film "Sunrise", Americans want to eat steak, potatoes and a little broccoli (McCain) and had their fill of thin crust all cheese pizza with arugula (Obama).

Damn, I totally want to have pizza from Tutta Bella for dinner now.

If an election can be rigged to produce a desired result, surely a poll can be similarly rigged.

Most polls are phone polls. This one definitely is. A phone poll taken over the weekend is a pretty dubious manner of ascertaining anything. When's the last time you answered a phone call (presumably on your cell phone since who has land-lines anymore) on the weekend from a caller you didn't know? These polls predominantly reach home-bound old people with land lines who have no lives.

But those are the people who vote, Kinaidos. Young people with cellies and Skype don't vote. They say they're going to, but they never do.

@6: and as such, this poll is probably an accurate reflection of the voting intent of home-bound senior citizens without caller ID who'll answer the phone on a weekend.

Mr. Eli Sanders,

You might consider investing a few minutes learning the rudiments of statistics as they are commonly used and reported for political polling purposes. Point estimates are lovely things but are meaningless without knowing the variability (margin of error). Both numbers should always be reported. Consider this Gallup poll of "likely voters" that has a margin of error of 4%:

McCain in June: 44% +-4% gives a low of 40% and a high of 48%
McCain in July: 49% +-4% gives a low of 45% and a high of 53%

So, the point estimate for McCain has increased but we're not really sure that it's any different from what we saw last month.

Do the same thing with the Daily Tracking Poll. The poll is larger and so the margin of error is smaller (2%). Has anything changed for certain?

Fnarf @7, I haven't had a landline for 9 years.  I use my cell phone for all calling (except for when I was in Japan and relied on, yes, Skype), and I vote every election I can.

Key words "that Gallup believes are most likely".

In other words, old people with land lines.

Reality is they're setting themselves up for Dewey beats Truman ...

Or it could be that Gallup's likely voter screen was more heavily weighed with conservatives for no apparent reason. Their own pollster says the likely voter number doesn't mean much but guess which one the Liberal Media is running with?

Much the same way Newsweek has Obama "falling" nearly 10 points by making the sample substantially whiter, older and more Republican between polls.

In both cases, weighting aside, actual opinions haven't shifted much in either direction.

@3

Which voters have "woken up?" The ones supporting Obama in one pole, or supporting McCain in the other? And what are they waking up to again? The McCain that has shifted his opinions on Iraq to match Obama, oops I mean Malaki's, the one that contradicts himself everyday with something he said or did the day before? He can't run an organized campaign, or stay on message, but he's the "real" thing? Cause as we all know, nothing is less American the pizza.

True, if Gallup is trying to "balance" conservative and liberal voters, or even self-identified party choice, the problem is that the US voting population has shifted from a 30-40-30 split of likely voters for GOP-Ind-Dem to a recent 20-40-40 split of GOP-Ind-Dem.

So if you "balance", you end up distorting reality.

There's no fire in the belly on the radical right side anymore, so we're talking Dewey defeats Truman.

And using landlines in the day and age when Cali, Oregon, WA, and many other states vote by permanent absentee mail ballots for the most part is a fool's game. It just takes one stamp.

Eli,
These polls are indeed, intriguing
(I've been following them intermittently since both McCain and Obama garnered their respective party nominations). But, what fascinates me more are the swing state polls which show McCain gaining. The conventional wisdom has indicated for quite awhile that Obama has not secured a significant bounce, popular as he seemingly is. With 100 days to go in the election the race remains close.

Early morning poll showing Obama ahead:

yay yay great great woo - hoo.

Mid afternoon poll showing Obama behind:
polls suck! Yeah they only call little old ladies! YEah msut be something wrong with that poll!

Reality:
What lark said.

There is no national election.

Right now if Obama gets the map he wants but loses MI OH VA -- we lose.

Right now he's withing the margin on the real clear averages for OH and VA and he is ahead like 4 points in Mich.

So this assumes he gets NV CO NM NH etc.

so basically if you step back a few feet and look at the map:

IT IS A DEAD HEAT RIGHT NOW.

Now given all the conomic mess and the vastly greater numbers of Americans who favor the generic D and the D positions on the issues this means we are not in the land of milk and honey, honey.

Seems like many are gulping the Evian, backwards.

We won't support spine-less NO-Bama and will re-defeat him in November!!!

Its not about the wounded soldiers or the statistical noise. . . . its that we are getting sick of Obama, Obama, Obama. Effectively, he won the Dem nomination by being the MySpace/YouTube/American Idol candidate; appealing to those younger and more fickle voters. Like Chris Daughtrey (sp?), Obama is going to be "voted off" the presidency because it is inconvenient to the young voter and because the rest of us are sick of him. Hillary is still my write in candidate. Go at it. . . .