Tracking Poll Tracking
There are two categories of polls that often get confused; there are regular polls, and then there are tracking polls. A regular poll asks a thousand voters, say, a question over a period of three or so days, and then puts out the numbers. A tracking poll asks 333 people every day, and each day publishes the results from the last three. Though intuitively each day’s tracking poll should be as accurate as one full poll, this is not the case. Then what’s the use? You read a tracking poll to see the track - i.e. which candidate is gaining, and which is losing.
This cycle, MyDD has added the useful feature of adding all of the tracking polls published each day and averaging them - it’s quick and dirty way to see sort of what the numbers are for each day. Incomprehensibly, though, they don’t write the preceding few days results, making it difficult to get the sense of the trends - the only reason you’re reading these polls anyway - without looking back. Well, if they don’t do it, I guess I do.
Date Barack Obama John McCain
10/25 51.25 42.63
10/26 51.00 42.50
10/27 50.63 43.75
10/28 50.25 44.13
What this shows is simple; though the numbers still look very positive for Obama, there has been over the last four days a steady weakening of his position and a steady strengthening of McCain’s. The trend, however, has been so mild that it isn’t of especial importance - over four days, a one point drop for Obama and a 1.5 point gain for McCain isn’t even close to what McCain needs with only a week to go. It does, however, suggest that there is little likelihood of an Obama blowout and that this election will probably tighten rather than explode.