CNN Plays with Polling Numbers

CNN reports yesterday:

(CNN) – As the general election campaign officially gets under way, a new poll suggests that Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are running neck-and-neck in Indiana.

In a Howey-Gauge survey of likely voters in the state, McCain has support from 45 percent of those polled, Obama from 43 percent, and 12 percent are unsure about their choice for president.

However, we learn something very key in the third graph:

The poll of 600 likely Indiana voters was conducted August 29-30 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points making the race a virtual tie.

In other words, the poll was conducted right after the Democratic Convention, before the GOP Convention, before the Palin speech. In essence, it’s a completely worthless poll in telling us anything about what the race looks like now in Indiana.

What I’ll be watching as a prognosticator is not the largely irrelevant national polls (We’re not holding a national popular election.) but state by state polls. Neither Rasmussen, nor Survey USA have released any state polls the last two weeks because they won’t tell us too much. CNN and Quinnipiac have beeen exceptions to this, along with a few local polling firms such as Howey-Gauge, who released a totally out of date poll that tells us nothing about the race but sure got the attention of CNN.