Any polls that come out now that were taken before last night are now moot. Hillary tanked. Badly.

Most of the variance between the polls is caused by differences in how "likely primary voter" is determined and in how hard the questions push the person interviewed to make a choice. Zogby tends to classify a slight leaner who's highly pursuadable as "undecided," while, say ABC/WaPo then to lump them in to the category of the candidate leaned. Both are perfectly valid methods of looking at the data and both capture information that's worth having.

The way to tell a poll that's either biased or else capturing something the others are missing (unfoturnately, its not always easy to tell which) is to see whether its trend lines over time move in a different direction than the other polls' trend lines.

well, I may be completely wrong. Apparently my past experience with Zogby isn't relevant to the results reported today.

Survey Methodology [Zogby America Democratic Primary Likely Voters] 10/24/07 thru 10/27/07

This is a telephone survey of [Democratic primary likely voters] conducted by Zogby International.

The target sample is [527] interviews with approximately [59] questions asked. Samples are randomly drawn from telephone cd’s of national listed sample. Zogby International surveys employ sampling strategies in which selection probabilities are proportional to population size within area codes and exchanges. Up to six calls are made to reach a sampled phone number. Cooperation rates are calculated using one of AAPOR’s approved methodologies[1] and are comparable to other professional public-opinion surveys conducted using similar sampling strategies.[2] Weighting by [party, age, race, religion, gender] is used to adjust for non-response. The margin of error is +/- 4.4 percentage points. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.

Zogby International’s sampling and weighting procedures also have been validated through its political polling: more than 95% of the firm’s polls have come within 1% of actual election-day outcomes.

I also note from tpm that Obama BEATS Giuliani in the national poll.

We need to see more comparisons of Obama or Edwards up against the GOP candidates - NOT - just up against Hillary.

Americans need to know they could win ALSO!

Coonsey's View
http://www.freewebs.com/coonsey/

And Quinnipiac confirms the UnElectable

Pete, I don't think the media would display polls unless the public wanted to see them. Your argument's the same as those that point with outrage at the overwhelmingly more significant amount of time given to the frontrunners in debates. People just want to hear more about them because more people like them. Alas, Dodd never really had a chance because he looks like everything we don't want (even though his views are really quite reasonable).

Anyway, I like hearing polling data, so long as I can contextualize them by knowing the pollsters. If you don't know anything about who's conducting the poll, ignore the poll until you understand them.

Seth, they can just focus on Iowa and NH polls or early state polls. National polls are pointless.

"Your argument's the same as those that point with outrage at the overwhelmingly more significant amount of time given to the frontrunners in debates. People just want to hear more about them because more people like them."

Wrong. The candidates that already have the most name recognition automatically get far more time than other candidates. Period. It has nothing to do with how well "liked" they are. If Hitler were running for US president today, he'd get more debate time than most other candidates.

No, she is slipping. Zogby's webpage references a previous poll it took in September, but the last poll it actually took before this one was October 10-14. She's slipped seven points since that one which is most definitely not within the margin of error.

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1624620720071017?pageNumber=1

Fox also polled during roughly the same two time periods. (10/23-24 and 10/9-10). It two shows a seven point drop for Hillary.

I refuse to link to Fox, but you can see their numbers here:

http://www.pollster.com/08-US-Dem-Pres-Primary.php

Consistent with its usual higher numbers overall, Fox pushes interviewees harder to make a choice so they put most of this shift into Obama's column. Zogby apparently puts the Clinton drop into the undecided category, which hints that Obama's pickup from Hillary during this two week period, if any, is pretty soft.

If Penn's internals are showing the same decline, it would explain both why Hillary took most of three days off the campaign trail to prep for the debate and also why, prep notwithstanding, she sucked. It could be that they're now scared they made their move too early and now she's peaked and moving down. Rattled, I believe is the word I'm looking for.

And yeah, Obama took no time off to prep and it showed. And yet, somehow, he won Luntz's focus group yet again. It could be that letting Edwards be the bad cop is working in terms of moving undecideds who are watching. Problem is, it doesn't move the Punditariat who tell all the ones who didn't watch what happened.