Did you know that Mondale led Reagan by 2-points in a NEWSWEEK poll four months before '84 election?

[book_worm]

Second, horserace polls taken this far ahead of an election are often very bad predictors. Walter Mondale led Reagan by 2 percentage points in a Newsweek poll taken four months before the 1984 election. Reagan won in the second-biggest blowout in presidential history, crushing Mondale 525 electoral votes to 13.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/raasch/2004-02-20-rausch_x.htm

Just throwing this out there for a little perspective regarding polls this early in the season, and particularly that NEWSWEEK poll which shows McCain closing the gap.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

1. Point taken, but it is quite unfair to compare Obama to Mondale,

and it's outrageously ludicrous to put McSame in the same sentence with Reagan. These are different times. The political, economic and social conditions that we now face were not confronted during Reagan. And what's more, we were not embroiled in two wars...and apparently another one on the way...during that time.

I tire of people comparing apples and oranges with regard to this contest. Reagan was a much stronger candidate than Mondale.

[book_worm]

6. I agree that Obama is in a much stronger position, ultimately he will win, but the polls

will be up and down in the next few months and no reason for people to get too worked up over it.

[snowbear]

7. Yeppers. That's why not many DU'ers even care to see polls right now..

There are a handful of people here who post every single poll that rolls down the pike.. But I think overall, more people here would rather ignore them until the last 2 or 3 weeks of the election.

~~~~~

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

9. Exactly. I don't care whether it's good news or bad news. The bottom line

is that polls don't mean diddly squat right now. More importantly, they are irrelevant because most of them are inaccurate, employing statistically biased methods to skew numbers every which way. But the most compelling reason for why we should not trust them, regardless of what they show, is because polls only capture a snapshot in time. That is why they fluctuate. Polls, however, can be a useful campaign tool for strategists trying to decide which tactic works and and gauge strengths and weaknesses. But even in that case, these pollsters come with their own biases. The numbers can be manipulated to illustrate a narrative to their liking and do not provide an accurate account of electorate in the long run.

[jobycom]

2. Dukakis led Bush, Clinton was in third place behind Bush and Perot...

Don't know the exact week count, but those were elections where one candidate had absolutely no chance to win four months before the election, but won.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. Sure.

I also know that apples and oranges are two different kinds of fruit.

http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html

[Douglas Carpenter]

4. The ONLY time Mondale led Reagan in any polls in the 8 months before the election was for a few days

immediately after choosing Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

That was the ONLY TIME in the eight months prior to the November 1984 election in which Mondale led Reagan and that lasted for about two or three days and quickly evaporated.

[Drunken Irishman]

8. And Kerry never had a sizable lead on Bush after winning the nomination.

There was a point, in early 2004, where Kerry built a double digit lead, but by spring and summer, it was neck-and-neck, with Kerry not once leading by more than 2-5 points. Obama, however, hasn't trailed McCain since winning the nomination.

[Political Heretic]

5. State by State polls, while not as frequent as national polls, are much better indicators.

It's what we should be watching.

You can't get "day-by-day" counts from states, but frankly day-by-day national polls fluctuate so much that they aren't worth much, unless you do a rolling average.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

10. I prefer the state polls themselves because you're dealing with

more precise, scaled down data. You can get a more accurate reading from internal polls that way and it seems easier to get data from state election boards on voter registration, likely voters, etc.

[Awsi Dooger]

11. Reagan was always a huge favorite

The odds never changed, even after that VP blip. I remember it specifically because my best friend at the time was a huge Republican. He was following the race closer than I was. Against a charismatic incumbent I basically gave Mondale no chance, paying less attention that cycle than any presidential year in my lifetime.

We had a bookie in Los Angeles who was dealing a presidential line. It was huge favoritism, in the 1/5 range. We called at the point of the tightening polls to check the odds. That guy was sharp, not overreacting and giving anything away. It was still 1/5 or thereabouts.

Threads like this shouldn't pretend Mondale was ever allowed an even chance, or anything close to that.

[pretzel4gore]

12. only 37 percent of voters voted....

when regan won first time, it was indeed a blowout for him, but the fact is the thing you see today, with a gibbering 1/2 wit playacting the commander in chief, does not reflect the true electorate, it reflects something invasive, like Aids, which took off under regan. In 1980, which was only 6 years after nixon was booted out, the pigmedia was ...well it was porky-piggish. If you can (anyone) recall; here's a detail from the 1980 election that literally made me mad, in the gibbering 1/2 wit sense of madness.... Carter's last budget ran a $58 billion dollar deficit. And mygod you cannot imagine the reaction in the newsmedia. They went nuts, damning the Carter gov for running up the nat debt etc. I still recall after all this time how the deficit led almost every news story- it made Carter look hapless...well there was also the hostage crisis, and Billy Carter, and Soviet 'invasion' in 1979 of Afghanistan (which, btw, had been a hippie haven for years while Kabul was under Russian puppets- their puppet was overthrown and a western puppet put in which caused the Russian invasion; needless to say backpackers have never been back!)..the news media in 1979 was solidly pro regan (which defied common sense- wasn't regan the bully boy gov of california during the Age of Acquarius only a decade before?)....what i'm trying to say is that vast, and relentless rightwing forces, were loosed by the 'counter culture', and they murdered and murdered and murdered some more, even while the newsmedia quietly helped the reactionaries by their jaundiced attitudes kept hidden from the people. The 1980 election brought the fewest voters ever to the polls, and it seemed improbable that a dunce like regan could win, but the media say he did. In light of what the bushevviks have done since (including having regan popped) And they gradually revised the true facts to make regan's win look like a landslide! ...the world has changed completely since then....we never went back to the moon, for one thing (the $30 billion for Appollo program was just too much, the pigs were aLways saying, it seems- plus there warn't any cheese on the moon, so why go?)
regan was a national disaster which still is going on... though no one knows it because everybody forgets what happened