Why the race is a lot closer than people think; Labor Day leads and election outcomes by Ruy Teixeira.

A good article which dissects the problems we're seeing in much of the polling data. Among other things, Teixeira, as he does on Donkey Rising frequently, criticizes the practice of surveying "likely voters" instead of "registered voters."

Gallup is one of those polls that used the "likely voter" model in its recent poll which showed Bush leading Kerry by 11 points. The poll is easily explained when you look at the fact that the Gallup model speculates that on election day, 40% of voters will be Republicans, while only 33% will be Democrats. Considering the Democratic Party is more motivated than I've seen it in memory, I find it hard to take the poll seriously at all.

One more thing on polling. Jimmy Breslin in Newsday (link via Kos) echoes what I was saying yesterday about the growing problem with polling by telephone. He interviewed pollster John Zogby who says this: "The people who are using telephone surveys are in denial," Zogby was saying. "It is similar to the '30s, when they first started polling by telephones and there were people who laughed at that and said you couldn't trust them because not everybody had a home phone. Now they try not to mention cell phones. They don't look or listen. They go ahead with a method that is old and wrong."