As promised earlier in the week, we said we would be separating out the poll results by pollster and report the electoral college math for each of them. For now, it only makes sense to report the results for Survey USA and Rasmussen Reports because they have performed so many more polls in so many more states as compared to their competitors.
Here is how the Obama versus McCain matchup would fare according to these two pollsters:
| Electoral Math Methodology | Obama | McCain |
| Survey USA Polls | 253 | 258 |
| Rasmussen Reports Polls | 221 | 238 |
| Latest Poll Per State | 289 | 249 |
McCain is ahead according to both Rasmussen Reports and Survey USA. We have to be careful not to say that McCain would win because he is unable to achieve the full 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.
The third methodology of estimating the electoral math shows Obama ahead by 40 points. Just a week ago, it showed Obama was ahead by over 150 electoral votes.
What does this all mean?
If you have been following our site over the past couple of months, you would know that it was not too long ago that McCain was ahead in the electoral math by a considerable margin over Obama. This was because Obama was in a heated primary struggle between Hillary Clinton. So the first thing that pops out at me is to dissect whether or not the Obama/Mccain matchup polls for each of these two pollsters are outdated. Because if they are so old that they represent a point in time when Obama was in a heated primary race — it would easily account for the Mccain lead.
But we took a look at the Rasmussen Reports polls and Survey USA polls and found that although Survey USA is a bit outdated in most of their state polls; most of the Rasmussen Reports were conducted in June.
The more likely issue is that it only takes a few percentage points difference in a few states to move the number considerably.. And that is what this may all represent..
Is the methodology used by Survey USA and/or Rasmussen Reports privvy to being flawed? Both Rasmussen Reports and Survey USA have an automated means of generating polling results … very similar to the method we at USAElectionPolls.com intend to use. The benefits of doing it in this method is the cost (cheap) and time (fast) at which data can be gathered.
There has been no scientific evidence out there to suggest this method produces any worse results than having a live telelphone interviewer. But in a race where Obama and McCain are expected to attract different kinds of people into the voting booths than the traditional Republicans and Democrats of old; this may not hold true for the 2008 Election.
Once the other pollsters come out with more data, we will be able to assess this issue in depth.
