AP-GfK are not ranked by 538. Who are they? What's their methodology? Why haven't they done any polling before this? Outlier.

It's all good.

Come on Washington, I know you want to be on the winning team. Join the McCain train to prosperity.

We've got funding...we've got programs...we'll take care of you.

Vote McCain...vote You!

I guess we have the Drudge Report's headline for tomorrow lined up then.

why are you reporting this? It's an outlier...deal with it.

If McCain gets elected I am going to curl up and die. Seriously!

I'm guessing their definition of "likely voter" is overly strict/just plain wrong.

@ 2 McCain's slogan is "Country First". With your argument, it should be, "Me First."

Seriously, Dan -- FiveThirtyEight.com should be your homepage for the next two weeks. These outliers shouldn't be causing you too much anxiety; the overall trends are massively in Obama's favor.

That's a poorly written article. Too much fluff. I have no idea who the 44% to 43% represent because this is what it states later in the article

"The AP-GfK survey included interviews with a large sample of adults including 800 deemed likely to vote. Among all 1,101 adults interviewed, the survey showed Obama ahead 47 percent to 37 percent. He was up by five points among registered voters."

Only the stoic string quartet playing on the decks of The National Review is desperate enough to put faith in that drivel.

So brave.

So. Brave.

I just polled all three people in the room with me right now. Based on the results of my scientific poll I predict that Obama will win 100% of the popular vote.

Maybe it's a poll of people who haven't already voted.

In the west between 25 and 30 percent of the voters have already cast their ballots, and there are substantial numbers in the rest of the country ...

Heck, even if you vote at the polls normally, you could drive down to Kent and vote TODAY.

well, likely voter usually means someone that voted in the last election. Many Obama voters will be first time voters. Thus, they are not "likely voters" but hopefully they will vote.

Eli, you should take that UW Extension statistics class I've been harping on.

Nate just took care of this trash:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/some-likely-voter-models-are-suspect.html

There's no surprise here. The poll's span is Oct 16-20. It's likely voter model is ultra-tradtional, and their sample method is a bit iffy, segregating cellphone users by region and adding that, effectively making it two related polls, on a cell phone poll with a huge margin of error etc.
If you look at Zogby you see McCain and Obama converging to within 3 points last week. Then it opened back up again.
So the poll contains no post powell bounce and it also doesn't reflect the rebound as the plumber nonsense was debunked.

@13 for the win.

The reality is - as the Wall Street Journal admitted today (in two articles) - that unlikely voters are voting in record droves - EARLY.

Kind of hard to defeat a Blue Tidal Wave.

Why haven't YOU voted yet?

During campaigns, pollsters like to show liberals up. It's good for business since liberals fret more over polls, as evinced by all the posts about polls here. A fair number of conservatives of my acquaintance don't even respond to them; I've told pollsters several times to get out of my face. But they do have their reputations for accuracy to be concerned about, so as Election Day approaches, they have to start tightening up so they can say they were only a few percentage point off on the day: you'll notice pollsters like to talk about how close they were on Election Day and not about other times.

It's been a fairly even race all along and will continue to be a fairly even race right down to the day, despite whoppers like CNN's "McCain Campaign Pulls Out Of Colorado," trumpeted on the very day that Mrs Palin was pulling a record crowd in Grand Junction and Todd Palin was speaking in Denver. You can sneer at Grand Junction, Colorado, if you like, but there are a lot of places like it. Quite a lot, in fact.

I'll take Rasmussen and SUSA to bed any day. AP on the other hand, not as good. I don't know if they're syphilitic idiots like Zogby, but I know they're not nearly as good as Ras.

@19 thank you, where do I get my trophy?

err..#17...err..bad joke backfires, abort

There are numerous articles out there showing that their cross tabs indicate that they polled about double the number of self-identified evangelical Christians that exist in the population at large.

Take a deep breath folks, this a poll from AP - which has shown more pro-McCain bias in this election than just about any other "news" organization this side of Fox.