ARG is polling all 50 states and DC on the race for president and today they released the final 30 or so of these polls. Here’s how ARG summarized what their data had to say (but check out all their data at their website):

How close is the race for president?
George W. Bush is at 47% and John Kerry is at 46% in the weighted national popular vote.
Bush leads outside the margin of error in 17 states with 133 electoral votes.
Kerry leads outside the margin of error in 10 states with 132 electoral votes.
Bush has any lead in 29 states with 253 electoral votes.
Kerry has any lead in 20 states with 270 electoral votes.
Bush and Kerry are tied in Wisconsin and West Virginia.
Bush needs to defend small leads in 5 states – Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Ohio.
Kerry needs to defend small leads in 5 states – Maine, Florida, Minnesota, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.
Among men nationwide, 51% say they would vote for Bush and 42% say they would vote for Kerry.
Among women nationwide, 42% say they would vote for Bush and 50% say they would vote for Kerry.

And here’s a brief take from Alan Abramowitz on these data:

The results of the new 50-state ARG poll appear to be very much in line with other recent polls in the same states. Using today’s National Journal Scoreboard, I found other polls conducted by independent, nonpartisan, or bipartisan polling organizations during approximately the same time period in 22 states. On average, support for George Bush was 0.6 points lower and support for John Kerry was 1.8 points higher in the ARG poll compared with the poll conducted closest in time to the ARG poll.
ARG’s conclusion that the national race is a virtual dead heat is consistent with the results of other recent state polls conducted by independent, bipartisan, and nonpartisan polling organzations.

Alan promises a more detailed analysis on Friday, so look for his further thoughts then.

John Kerry leads George Bush 49-41 among Washington State RV’s, with 2 percent for Nader and 8 percent unsure, according to a poll conducted Sept. 17-20 by Ipsos-Public Affairs for The Columbian.

Those who defend the sudden tilt toward the Republicans in registered voter samples as a real political trend and not any kind of sampling problem, like to point toward the post-9/11 period as an example of a recent shift in the party ID distribution. If it happened then, they say, why shouldn’t we give full credence to the shift we’re seeing now?
But there is a very serious problem with this logic. After 9/11, despite the immensity of the rally effect behind the president and his party, the shift in party ID toward the Republicans was substantially less than what we’re seeing now. What polls showed then was not a shift toward a 4-5 point (or more) Republican advantage in party ID–like we’re seeing in some current polls–but rather a simple reduction in the Democratic edge or at best parity. Moreover, even this modest shift took place over several months, rather than over several weeks, like the shifts we’ve seen in some recent polls. (Note: these Republican gains were given back in a year or two, so the Democrats this year have had their a party ID edge at about the same level they had in 2000 and early 2001.)
Given this, how believable is it that we would now be getting not a gradual reduction in the Democratic party ID advantage (as we did after 9/11) but a much more sudden, much larger shift in party ID to produce an actual Republican advantage of 4-5 points or more? Are we really to believe that the GOP convention was such an earthshaking event that it had a bigger effect on the underlying sentiments of the electorate than did 9/11 and Bush’s six months of 80+ approval ratings in the post-9/11 period?
And this from a convention that poll data said was viewed with a distinct lack of enthusiasm by the public! According to the Gallup poll, Bush’s acceptance speech, which the media fawned over so ostentatiously, was not rated any better by the public than was Kerry’s–in fact, it received slightly worse ratings. Kerry’s acceptance speech was rated excellent by 25 percent and good by 27 percent; Bush’s was rated excellent by 22 percent and good by 27 percent.
In terms of whether the Republican convention made voters more or less likely to vote for Bush, there were almost as many saying the convention made them less likely to vote for Bush (38 percent) as said it made them more likely (41 percent).
That was actually quite a poor performance. The Democratic convention this year had a substantially better 44 percent more likely/30 percent less likely split. In fact, looking back to 1984, which is as far back as Gallup supplies data, no candidate has ever had a more likely to vote for/less likely to vote for split even close to as bad as Bush’s this year.
Well, what about the tone of the convention? Did voters think the Republicans got that one right? Nope. Just 39 percent thought the GOP maintained the right balance between criticizing the Democrats and saying positive things about themselves, compared to 50 percent who thought they spent too much time criticizing the Democrats. By contrast, in 2000, 45 percent thought the GOP maintained the right balance in their convention, compared to 38 percent who thought they spent too much time criticizing.
Can anyone seriously maintain, then, that this year’s GOP convention was such a blockbuster that it could produce a surge in Republican party ID that dwarfs that produced by 9/11? It just does not compute.
Still not convinced that party-weighting should at least be considered to correct for sudden partisan imbalances in polls? I close with the words of Charlie Cook in his latest online column:

…Pollsters acknowledge variances from one poll to the next in gender, race, income and education, and they correct for it, but refuse to acknowledge that partisan numbers fluctuate just the same, and need to be corrected.
My own view is that samples should be weighted by party to the average party breakdown in a combination of the polls for the last several months, linking it to a very large sample of combined surveys to reduce sampling error. While this method might be a bit sluggish if party identification is changing dramatically, it would mean that when a candidate is gaining or dropping, it is most likely because they really are, not because of a sample that is too tilted in favor of one party or the other. If Republicans are indeed gaining in party identification, it will show up after a couple of polls in the average.

You tell ’em, Charlie.

Bush leads Kerry 48-43 percent among Iowa RV’s, with 3 percent for Nader and 6 percent for neither in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted Sept. 16-19, 2004.
Kerry leads Bush 48-44, with 2 perent for Nader and 6 percent unsure in a poll of Michigan LV’s by EPIC/MRA conducted Sept. 15-19, 2004.
Bush leads Kerry 54-43 percent among Ohio LV’s, with 2 percent for Nader and 1 percent unsure, according to the Ohio Poll conducted Sept. 12-18 by the Institute for Policy Research of the University of Cincinnati.
Kerry leads Bush 51-44 among Oregon LV’s, with 5 percent unsure in a poll by Research 2000 for The Portland Tribune, et al. conducted Sept. 13-16.

Bush leads Kerry 44-43 percent in a head-to-head match-up of nation-wide RV’s, with 13 percent unsure, according to a Investor’s Business Daily/Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll conducted by TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence Sept. 14-18, 2004.

The Zogby Interactive Poll of LV’s was conducted for the Wall St. Journal Sept. 13-17.
Kerry’s leads (%): Arkansas 0.1; Florida 0.5; Iowa 3.0; Michigan 6.0;
Minnesota 9.7; New Hampshire 3.6: New Mexico 12.7; Oregon 12.0; Pennsylvania 3.1; Washington 8.7; Wisconsin 2.4
Bush’s leads (%): Missouri 5.4; Nevada 2.2; Ohio 3.3; Tennessee 5.5; West Virginia 12.4

This month, ARG is polling every state in the presidential contest. Recently, they released the first 20 of these polls and the results looked pretty good for Kerry. How much faith should we put in these polls? How well did their polls turn out in 2000 when they also polled all 50 states?
Alan Abramowitz has looked at ARG’s track record and here’s what he found:

My analysis of ARG’s September, 2000 poll of all 50 states plus the District of Columbia indicates that, in general, the poll was highly accurate. On average, the state by state results yielded an average lead for Al Gore of about 1 percentage point in September. On Election Day, Gore actually lost the average state by an average margin of 3.6 percentage points even though he narrowly won the national popular vote. This is due to the equal weighting in the average of heavily populated states and sparsely populated states. Gore carried 6 of the 9 most populous states while Bush carried 15 of the 20 least populous states.
The 4.6 point shift to Bush between the ARG poll and Election Day can easily be explained by the fact that the poll was conducted at a time when Gore was leading in almost all of the national polls, before the first presidential debate. By Election Day, of course, the race had narrowed to a virtual dead heat.
The ARG September poll accurately predicted the winner of 45 of the 50 states, missing only Missouri, West Virginia, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. I am, of course, counting ARG’s poll showing Al Gore leading George Bush in Florida as a correct prediction since Gore did actually receive more votes, or at least intended votes, than Bush in Florida.
The correlation between the ARG September poll results and the actual election results is a very impressive .95. This means that the results of the ARG poll explain about 90 percent of the variation in the state-by-state election results.
The ARG 50-state poll, done well before Election Day, provided to be a much more reliable predictor of the actual results of the 2000 presidential election than the Gallup tracking poll which gyrated wildly in the weeks leading up to the election, sometimes showing sizeable leads for Bush, sometimes showing sizeable leads for Gore, and sometimes showing a close race. Indeed, only 10 days before Election Day, Gallup’s tracking poll had George Bush leading Al Gore by 13 points–similar to Bush’s lead over John Kerry [among likely voters] in Gallup’s most recent 2004 poll.
Therefore, we can have a good deal of confidence in the accuracy of ARG’s 2004 50-state poll which, based on the first 20 states that have been released thus far, seems to indicate that, contrary to some (but not all) recent national polls, we have a very close presidential contest. Kerry is leading by a comfortable margin in every blue state. More importantly, he is leading in 4 of the 5 battleground states included in the first wave and is only trailing by 1 point in Colorado–a state that George Bush carried by 9 points in the 2000 election. Another very recent newspaper poll in Colorado shows the same thing.
My advice is watch the rest of the ARG state polls as they are released….I predict that they will continue to show a very competitive battlefield in the 2004 presidential election.

ARG releases the rest of their state polls on September 22. Stay tuned.

Bush leads Kerry 47-44 percent among nation-wide LV’s, with 7 percent
undecided in a Zogby America poll conducted Sept. 17-19.

As Chris Bowers of MyDD points out in his insightful new essay, “Rapid Poll Movement is a General Election Myth“, the new CBS/NYT poll is actually a lot worse for Bush than the CBS News poll released a week earlier, even though both polls gave Bush a 50-42 lead among RVs. That’s because, since the current poll is substantially more Republican than the earlier poll (which actually had a slight Democratic edge), Bush should actually have performed better than the earlier poll on the horse race and on indicators like job approval and right/direction wrong track in this poll, instead of about the same. That also means that if we adjust the current poll to correct the apparent surplus of Republicans, Bush’s performance on these indicators should actually decline below the measurements of the earlier poll.
Since CBS News thoughtfully provides the overall result and the result broken down by party ID for each and every question in their survey, it is possible to estimate what Bush’s ratings would have looked like if there weren’t so many Republicans in the sample. Here are some examples, based on reweighting the current poll to the 2000 exit poll distribution of partisanship:
Overall job approval: 49 percent approval/44 percent disapproval
Economic job approval: 42/52
Iraq job approval: 45/51
Campaign against terrorism job approval: 57/37
Right direction/wrong track: 40/53
In every case, these ratings are worse than they were a week ago, making the idea that the race is tightening up more plausible.
Of course, Kerry needs not just a tight race, but to pull ahead. Given Bush’s continued vulnerabilities, which these data highlight, Kerry’s got the opening to do so. I’ll address this issue in future posts.

John Harwood has a front-page article in the Monday Wall Street Journal that does an excellent job of summarizing and discussing the debate that has been unfolding around the problems with recent polls. Of course, here on DonkeyRising I have discussed these problems in detail and defended the proposition that, once these problems are taken into account, the Presidential race is close to tied.
Or, as the article puts it:

If the CBS and Pew surveys are adjusted to reflect comparable numbers of Republicans and Democrats, their results would have been virtually identical.
Indeed that’s precisely what liberal polling analyst Ruy Teixeira did on his Web log, called Emerging Democratic Majority. As the New York Times report of the poll carried the headline “Bush Opens Lead,” Mr. Teixeira’s blog declared, “CBS News/New York Times poll has it close to even.”
…Mr. Teixeira argues that the Democratic edge Mr. Kohut [of the Pew Research Center] found is realistic, since exit polls from the 1996 and 2000 campaigns indicated that in both cases four percentage points more Democrats than Republicans showed up to vote. Slightly more self-described Democrats than Republicans voted in the 1984, 1988 and 1992 elections as well.

Nice to see some of the these very important arguments escaping the blogosphere ghetto and entering the mainstream press.