UPDATED: Final polling update: Obama-Biden sitting pretty, McCain looking like long shot

General election national polling results (source: RealClearPolitics.com)

With the election tomorrow, this will be the final update on the polling data and where it points.

Trick or Treat?

First things first, let’s talk about that Friday Zogby poll that said McCain had a 1-point lead nationally, which the Drudge Report announced so breathlessly and which frightened so many Democrats on Halloween night. Here’s a link to the actual poll, which includes this statement from John Zogby:

Is McCain making a move? The three-day average holds steady, but McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%. He is beginning to cut into Obama’s lead among independents, is now leading among blue collar voters, has strengthened his lead among investors and among men, and is walloping Obama among NASCAR voters. Joe the Plumber may get his license after all. Obama’s lead among women declined, and it looks like it is occurring because McCain is solidifying the support of conservative women, which is something we saw last time McCain picked up in the polls. If McCain has a good day tomorrow, we will eliminate Obama’s good day three days ago, and we could really see some tightening in this rolling average. But for now, hold on.”

Don’t let this Halloween announcement spook you.

First, as we explained in an earlier article, the Zogby poll is the least reliable of all the national tracking polls because it is still basing its demographic weighting on data from the 2004 election, ignoring the enormous changes in election dynamics in the last four years. Polling expert Nate Silver calls the Zogby tracking poll “obviously dubious” and he weighed in on the Halloween Zogby poll result on his Web site:

There are a couple of significant problems with this. Firstly, there is a reason that pollsters include multiple days of interviewing in their tracking polls; a one-day sample is extremely volatile, and have very high margins for error. Secondly, the Zogby polls have been particularly volatile, because he uses nonsensical party ID weightings, which mean that his weighting process involves making numbers doing naughty things that they usually don’t like to do.

Thirdly, Zogby polls are generally a lagging rather than a leading indicator. This is because he splits his interviewing period over two days; most of the interviews that were conducted in this sample took place on Thursday night, with a few this afternoon (Friday). The reason this is significant is because lots of other pollsters were in the field on Thursday night, and most of them evidently showed good numbers for Obama, as he improved his standing in 6 of the 7 non-Zogby trackers.

What we have here is an outlier, a single polling result at odds with all the other polls because of poor methodology. Indeed, the result doesn’t even agree with itself. Even including that anomalous one-day result, the Zogby tracking poll on Sunday still gave Obama a 6-point lead. The other major national tracking polls agreed, putting the lead between 5 and 9 points.

Michigan presidential polling results (source: RealClearPolitics.com)

State-by-state polls

As always, however, it is the state polls that matter because the state-by-state voting determines the Electoral College vote. Silver correctly says that this is essentially a five-state race at this point: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado. McCain, for all practical purposes, has to sweep at least four of those states and he is currently behind in all of them.

Pennsylvania trending upward for McCain, but he’s still down 4-9 points

Pennsylvania does appear to be tightening, however. Where last week most of the poll results had Obama ahead by 10-13 points, the most recent polls put the lead in the 4-9 point range. Silver notes that while the race there has tightened, he thinks it is very unlikely that McCain can win the state:

Pennsylvania is still an extreme long shot for John McCain — Obama is more likely to win Arizona than McCain the Keystone — just not quite the long shot that it had looked like a couple of days ago.

Obama’s Ohio, Virginia leads steady

The lead in Ohio remains in the same range, between 4 and 9 points for Obama, where it has been for the last two weeks. And the lead in Virginia is essentially the same, with the last five polls all between 4 and 9 points. Colorado is a little safer in Obama territory, sitting between 6 and 8 points in most polls. Nevada polls show a race in the 4-5 point range for Obama. And in Florida, the lead is between 4 and 7 points. North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri are all statistical dead heats.

Early voting results favor Dems

One thing that must be mentioned are the early voting numbers, which are skewing heavily Democratic in most states that allow early voting. They’re also showing much higher numbers of young and minority voters showing up at the polls, which is exactly what the Obama campaign has been predicting for months. In Ohio, for instance, the number of Democrats casting early ballots has almost doubled that of Republicans. If those trends hold on Election Day, it is hard to imagine how McCain could overcome such a higher turnout.

To win the election a candidate needs 270 electoral votes.

The bottom line is this: It looks like Obama has nearly 270 electoral votes solidly in his column and he is leading or tied in almost all of the key swing states. In order to win, McCain essentially has to run the table by taking away Pennsylvania, and keeping Ohio and Virginia and all of the smaller swing states. The likelihood of that happening seems quite low. Even Republican polling expert Frank Luntz told the BBC on Sunday morning, “I cannot foresee a scenario that John McCain is elected president of the United States.”

Update: Nate Silver has a very interesting post that includes information that is worth noting. Some of the national tracking polls include cell phones in their samples and some do not. When you look at the results of the ones that do versus the ones that don’t, there is a striking result: The polls that include cell phone users have a significantly higher lead for Obama than those that include only landline users.

The polls with the four largest margins for Obama — the CBS/New York Times poll, the ABC/Washington Post poll and both Gallup likely voter polls — include cell phones. The Obama lead in those polls ranges from 8 to 13 points. One other poll that includes cell phones, the Pew poll, puts the lead at 6 points. The other nine polls that do not include cell phones all have the Obama lead at 7 points or lower.

Why is this important? A few months ago, we published an article on cell phones and polling that included data saying that cell phone use was higher among demographics that are most favorable to Obama. In particular, cell phone users are younger and less likely to be white. Polls that do not reach such users are almost certainly not getting a truly representative sample.