Tracking Poll Movement?

We’ve decided to include two additional trackers–Zogby and IBD/TIPP– in our new methodology, for a total of six trackers.  Our new methodology weights by the number of respondents in each poll (inverse of the square root of the sample size). Therefore, Rasmussen and Gallup (which survey about three times as many people as the other trackers) have a weight of 1.7 and all other polls have a weight of 1.0.

Here is a look at the past six days for all six trackers:

Date	Gallup*	Rasmussen	Hotline	Research 2000	Zogby	IBD/TIPP	6-Poll Adjusted Average
10/13	10	5	6	12	4	2	6.7
10/14	9	5	6	11	6	3	6.7
10/15	7	5	8	11	4	3	6.3
10/16	6	4	8	11	5	4	6.1
10/17	6	4	10	10	5	5	6.4
10/18	4	5	7	7	4	7	5.4

Here are the trends for the month prior to this past week:

As you can see, Obama’s rise in the polls appears to have peaked about a week ago at an advantage or 8 or 9 percentage points. This makes sense as this was likely his ceiling of support (54 or 55% of the vote in a two-person race). This weekend (with a little over two weeks left), it appears that Obama is now ahead by 5 or 6 percentage points. I believe that we may now be in the middle of a regression to the mean of Obama +4 or 5 percentage points, which is where the long-term equilibrium for this race was for most of the summer. Therefore, in a way, the more things change, the more they stay the same…

*Gallup has switched to reporting likely voters in the past week, so their trends are not as straightforward as they may appear*