Here's why Alter is WRONG and why he knows better [View All]

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Changes in the last week of campaigning are unusual, very.

Alter claims that McCain can win because many voters are "low information voter

Oh, lord. What they'll do to set up a stolen election.

Voters don't change their minds that much in the last 3 weeks of a campaign, let alone the last 8 days.

Why Alter is propping up the plausibility of a McCain win at this point is his problem.

But he's simply full of shit.

Presidential Polls in the Final Weeks of the Campaign
13 Oct 2008

Posted by Robert S. Erikson

With about three weeks to go before the election, Obama leads McCain by about eight points. While an upset remains possible, Obama is clearly poised as the likely presidential winner. What can we expect from the polls over the next three weeks, and how well will they predict the actual outcome?

For poll-watchers, the temptation is to treat every new poll as a decisive piece of new evidence, as if any departure from the current trend might indicate a change that will carry forward to Election Day. But the next outlier we see will probably be an artifact of routine sampling error rather than a harbinger of true change. True change in preferences occurs slowly, especially during the final weeks of a campaign. Observe the following graph of the Bush-Kerry vote in the polls during the final 28 days leading up to the 2004 campaign.

The most remarkable fact is the near absence of cases in the off-diagonal—where the leader in the poll-of-polls ends up losing. The two exceptions of late-campaign comebacks are Truman’s famous surge in 1948 (partially an artifact of bad polling) and 2000 (Gore’s futile popular vote comeback). Robert S. Erickson, Princeton.edu