There’s been a lot of chatter over the last few days to the effect that the major tracking polls show John McCain closing the gap against Barack Obama. Now, before going forward, I want to preface this by saying that you just can’t live or die on the basis of small gyrations in tracking polls — not if you want to live to an old age. A lot of this is just statistical noise. But to the extent that people have gotten preoccupied with this, I wanted to show you the latest release of our TPM Track Composite which came out a little less than an hour ago.
Here’s the chart from October 5th through tonight’s result …
As you can see, the margin was narrowing over the weekend and in the beginning of this week. But then it stabilized. And there’s some indication that it’s now widening again. Remember, all of this could be statistical noise. No race is over until it’s over — especially one with as many unique factors as this one. But if you’re going to go on the basis of the tracking polls, the most recent evidence points either to a stable race or even Obama again moving ahead.
