To me it looks like the classic Napoleon's march to Moscow from Edward Tufte's book on quantitative graphics:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/graphics/poster_OrigMinard.gif

Turtles! Start your engines!

John Bailo: I think you mean "tortoises." I've read this "tortoise and the hare" analogy on like six conservablogs in the last day and a half: who started it?

How many baby/pregnancy jokes am I going to have to hear between now and November? Anybody?

If you read the link, Gallup is saying it's a post convention bump due to the fact that HRC supproters who weren't for OBama were moved into the Obama camp due to the efforts of

1. Hillary Clinton.
2. Bill Clinton.
3. Barack Obama, for letting both of them speak so prominently.

"The percentage of former Clinton voters who say they are certain to vote for Obama has now jumped to 65%."

Um, still a bit more work to do there.

"Although 12% of former Clinton voters persist in saying that they are going to vote for McCain,"
um, still a bit more work to do there.

"that's down from 16%, and the percentage who are undecided has dropped in half.
Overall, support for Obama among this group has moved from 70% pre-convention to 81% post-convention."

Um, with 19% still not with Obama, still a bit more work to do there.

Solutions:
1. Feature HRC more on the campaign trail. Who is better at getting formerHRC voters to come home?

2. Continue the focus on economics.

Btw that means this Palin culture wars stuff may not be on point. It's the economy, stupid.

3. Feature Billdwawg more, too.

4. Perhaps shut up with the internecine attacks on HRC and Billdawg like when hordes of Obama fanatics were whining about how they got two nights to give speeches at the convention, look how greedy and ambitious they were, blah blah, why it's horrible that a former president should speak and a person with 18 million votes should speak ohmygod they are the bitchdevil and her deveilish partner blah blah blah.

Fortunately Obama's a bit smarter than his base and isn't going around knocking the Clintons. (Too bad he didn't actually pick HRC, then we still wouldn't have that 19% out there not yet with Obama. Maybe the ticket would be at 54% if he had, we'll never know for sure. But that's over and done with.)

Unity y'all--

To be sure, former Clinton supporters are still less enthusiastic than former Obama supporters in the post-convention poll. And, the fact that 12% still say they are going to vote for McCain is no doubt troubling to the Obama camp. But it appears that, from a broad perspective, the concentrated effort by Obama's campaign managers to feature both Hillary and Bill Clinton in prominent roles, and efforts by Hillary Clinton to emphasize her support for Obama going into the November election, may have paid off.

Another way to get the remaining HRC vote might be to suggest that to safeguard Roe v. Wade, HRC might be offered the next supreme court vacancy. On the other hand, maybe she already has been offered and they don't want to energize the right wing.

And remember, with nearly all MSM polling, these Gallup numbers are of people contacted via landlines (excluding people who only use cell phones) and excludes newly registered and first-time voters who aren't on pollsters lists to call. So when you factor in those two groups (who are VERY pro-Obama)...

Sample size variance?

It is ok, these poling results are nothing that Diebold can't fix come the election.

or even "polling" results.

It's the "Baby Bump"

PC, the amount of bullshit you can store and regurgitate never ceases to amaze.

No one is complaining about the amount of time Bill and Hillary took at the convention. No one rational, that is; maybe that's outside of your circle of acquaintance?

Most people are celebrating Hillary and Bill's great speeches. We're not attacking Hillary, either; we're attacking a small subset of her supporters -- people like YOU, who have nothing to contribute to this or any other discussion except your massively aggrieved sense of entitlement and woundedness.

The fact that YOUR OWN CANDIDATE has left you behind in your puddle of tears, and your demands to be wooed and suckled endlessly, tells anyone who's watching what you're really about.

Fuck you, PC. Fuck you and all the deadenders.

I plan to ignore all polls for about the next week or so. Polls right around the conventions tend to be highly volatile. Add to that the Hillary factor. Add to that the Hurricane Gustav distraction. Add to that the Palin surprise.

Polling right now is likely to be all over the place, and not particularly indicative of how things will go in November. Wait a couple weeks for this to all settle out, and then the polls will start becoming more relevant again.

Finally, national polls are somewhat meaningless. As we discovered in 2000, it isn't the popular vote that counts, it's the electoral college. Polls broken down by electoral college are the only ones worth paying any attention to.

pc, fnarf is dead on here. the reason obama didn't take hrc for his vp?: he might actually have LOST votes in doing so. you think biden has negatives? it's nothing compared to the baggage hrc carries. as someone recently commented on slog, the repugs have been building a was chest of dirt on her for years, and we killed their collective boner by not nominating her. we dodged a bullet. don't you get that?

er, that's "war chest"

Palin is an attempt to draw out the Dem trolls and make them look bad. I expect there are some Repugs posing as Dem trolls too, to amplify the noise. This is why McCain picked an obviously flawed candidate and why they leaked stories about Bristol.

Obama's strategy: play the high road, and bring on an attack dog. McCain's strategy: tout self, and bring on a deflatable trojan scapegoat to distract the attacks.

But... as it turns out, it looks like it's backfiring for McCain. Attracting and amplifying the attacks onto Palin is making people actually question both of their judgments, and deflating won't make that go away.

One poll does not an election make.

Even if the GOP is drowning in incompetence and fraud stories right now.

Anyone else heard Gonzalez broke the law regarding secret material - in my day you went to jail for almost a decade for that ... but no investigation or Special Prosecutor ...

According to a few things I've read (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/08/why-oh-why-ca-3.html), pretty much any change less than 2% in one day is statistical noise.