There’s been much discussion among bloggers, especially those who seem eager to discount any bad news about the McCain campaign about this report from Gallup regarding the predictive ability of July poll results:
PRINCETON, NJ — In 9 of the past 15 U.S. presidential elections, the candidate who was leading in Gallup polling roughly four months before the election ultimately won the popular vote for president. However, narrowing the set of races to the nine that were competitive, the early polling proved prescient in only three of those.
With Barack Obama leading John McCain by no more than six percentage points in Gallup’s early July polling, the 2008 race currently fits best into the “competitive” category. Given that assumption, Gallup’s election trends from a comparable point in previous presidential election years offer no strong indication of whether Obama or McCain is headed for victory in November.
Though it’s not clearly stated, Gallup seems to define “competitive” as those races where either the July poll margin or the November margin of victory were within 5-6% and lists these as the “competitive” races of the past 60 years:
While this would seem to suggest that McCain still has a chance of pulling ahead of Obama, Matthew Yglesias makes an excellent point about the flaw in Gallup’s argument:
If you look at the most recent fifteen presidential elections, the July polling leader has won big six times, won narrowly three times, and lost narrowly six times. That gives you the totally intuitive result that leading in July is better news that losing in July, but that it doesn’t guarantee anything.
Of course, there have been plenty of times since January when this entire race has seemed counter-intuitive, so it’s entirely true that anything can happen between now and Election Day.
As things stand right now, though, its fairly clear from the Electoral Map, the National Polls, and the Intrade numbers that Barack Obama has a distinct advantage right now and there’s something to be said for that.
