Needlenose

Poll analyst extraordinaire Nate Silver wrote on Monday:

It’s amazing how much convergence there has been in the national numbers over the past 24 hours. . . . Has the race settled down some?

Perhaps in some proverbial sense it has. But I also think that pollsters peek at one another’s results, and that there’s something of a herd mentality not to be the one who falls out of line. Remember, folks, it’s these final sets of national numbers that will go down on the record for all time’s sake. Remember also that a pollster has a lot of legitimate wiggle room for how they put their turnout models together. I’m not accusing anyone of anything in particular, but this is the time of year when a lot of pollsters might be tempted to put their fingers on the scale.

In case you’re wondering who Nate was pretending not to talk about, the TIPP poll sponsored by Investor’s Business Daily (an even further right-wing imitator of the Wall Street Journal) showed Barack Obama leading John McCain by a mere 2 points on Sunday, leading to much fantasizing among Republicans about a McCain comeback.

With the actual election closing in on Monday, though, the TIPP/IBD poll suddenly shifted aggressively toward Obama, who soared to a 7-point lead on the strength of its final-day sample and a lopsided “allocation” of undecided voters (2 to 1 in favor of Obama).  The final result brought TIPP into line with all of the other major pollsters, and thus was not embarrassingly far off from Tuesday’s actual voting.  Convenient, eh?

Kudos, by the way, to Silver for projecting the final popular vote within a tenth of a percentage point (52.3% Obama to 46.2% McCain, versus 52.4% to 46.3% in the not-quite-final tallies), and the Pew Research Center, which projected a 52-46 result two days in advance based on its (apparently more scientific) allocation of undecided voters.

A new Time magazine poll today (which shows Barack Obama leading John McCain 50% to 43%) includes this result:

Asked if it was accurate to say that the real Barack Obama holds extreme positions that won’t be revealed until after he’s elected, surveyed voters split 46%-46%.

Whether respondents doubted that Obama holds such positions, but wished he did, was apparently left unasked.

A month ago, I wrote about how the ad wars and campaign counterattacks of the 2008 presidential race were having little effect on the polls, since undecided voters weren’t paying much attention.

The high TV ratings for the closing days of the Republican convention, along with the latest polls showing McCain edging into a lead over Obama, suggest that the tabloid-friendly nomination of Sarah Palin as VP caught their notice just long enough to be won over (temporarily, at least) by the “she’s a disaster — no, wait, she’s America’s new conservative sweetheart!” turnabout.

Not only that, the extended apathy toward the race has let McCain revive his effort to become the world’s oldest chameleon. Anyone who tuned in to Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention saw an earnest, heartfelt promise to change America. Thanks to the lack of policy specifics and the GOP’s efforts to confuse the electorate, low-information voters who watched McCain’s speech saw a guy who seemed to promise the same thing — only he’s a war hero and has a swingin’ sidekick, too!

As long as no one pays attention to the facts, McCain could get away with it. Obama’s challenge is to inject reality into the race without coming across as a dry, wonky scold (which is exactly the Kerry/Gore mold the GOP would like him to fall into). It’s also going to be a problem that many of the voters who let their opinions be influenced this past week aren’t going to pay much attention again until the debates start later this month — in which time the Republicans will be pressuring the not-likely-to-resist media to essentially declare the election already over, with McCain the presumptive winner.

Obama will not only have to pay for his own microphone, but use it more forcefully and skillfully (or at least do so more consistently) in the coming weeks than he has in the preceding few months if he wants to swing the political conversation back in his favor. (More to come on that subject when I get a chance.)

If you’re the kind of political junkie who reads progressive blogs even in the dog days of summer, there’s a good chance you’ve spent the last couple of weeks agonizing over John McCain’s shamelessly dishonest attacks on Barack Obama and searching for meaning in the flimsiest movements of poll data. If so, the latest poll from CBS News has results that you will find either frustrating or calming:

Barack Obama leads John McCain 45 percent to 39 percent in the latest CBS News poll. Despite Obama’s highly-publicized foreign trip and McCain’s recent high-profile advertisements, the findings are unchanged since a CBS News/New York Times poll released last month. The percentage of undecided voters – 13 percent – also remains steady.

How can this be, amid such seemingly high-profile developments and volatile rhetoric? A couple of paragraphs at the end of the report give us a clue:

CBS News re-interviewed voters who said they were uncommitted, including those who had a candidate but said their minds could change, when we first spoke with them in a CBS News/New York Times poll in mid-July. In the July poll, that was about 36 percent of all registered voters.

The most recent round of interviews suggest that these uncommitted voters remain largely up for grabs.

. . . This group seems to have become less interested in the campaign since last month. When asked in mid-July how much attention they’d been paying to the 2008 campaign generally, 45 percent said they’d paid a lot. When asked in this poll how much attention they’d been paying in the last few weeks, only 18 percent reported paying a lot of attention.

So if you’re feeling like maybe it’s a good time to take a break from obsessing over the presidential race, you can take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)