Points For Enthusiasm

Andrew Sullivan, you gotta love him.

Seriously, I like Sully.  Always have, but this time he strikes me as jumping the gun just a little bit.

Under the title, “Obama’s March Surge”, he produces this graph of the latest Gallup daily tracking poll:

I do give points for enthusiasm; people have been a little too quick in penning Obama’s epitaph following the March 4th primaries and it’s well worth noting that not only is Obama still in the race, he’s still winning it.

On the other hand, Sully should most definitely know better.

As I continue to hammer over and over again, individual polls are not the most trustworthy things in the world.  I could walk around my office building and tell you within 5% assurance that America wants George W. Bush to stay on for a third term, but of course we would know that those numbers are probably off by a skosh.

Fact is, no single poll should be taken as gospel for a variety of reasons not excluding statistical noise, methodology, sampling size, and sampling error.  Now, the GDTP is a little better than a regular poll given that we are talking about weighted data for three day periods and a built in trend analysis system, but that only ups reliability of the poll by so much.

In this way, the GDTP’s numbers are still suspect, but the trending itself can be quite useful.  Unfortunately, this is the beginning of a trend that is at best only half of a week old and coming off of two lead changes.

In other words, we don’t know if what we are looking at is an Obama surge, or merely more back and forth which is most likely indicative of the true electorate being evenly split with any gaps being either too small or too fluid for a poll to accurately measure.

That’s what I get from this graph.

Pollster’s aggregated trend graph is more reliable and indeed shows Obama gaining momentum, but the graph itself hasn’t been updated since the last week of February.

So right now I’m hesitant to call this a surge for Obama, and believe we need to at least wait a few more days before we can call it that.  But if this trend should hold, it does speak volumes of not only the race, but of the qualities of Obama as a candidate.  Keep in mind that Obama is effectively fighting a war on two fronts.  He has Hillary going after him from within the party, and he has McCain and conservative pundits going after him outside the party.

To withstand a barrage such as that and still come up with an upward trend means that Clinton’s criticism that Obama can’t stand up to the Right Wing Attack Machine is about as dead wrong as it gets.