How Many Polls Does It Take to Screw Up an Election?

The blogs yesterday were buzzing with bad news for Democrats: the new Gallup/USA Today poll showed John McCain opening up a 54%-44% lead over Barack Obama.

Well, it turns out that the prediction of Obama's demise might have been a little preemptive, because a rash of polls were released yesterday, and every one of them except for Gallup showed the race in a statistical dead heat.

There's no question that McCain has gone up in the polls, but he’s certainly not leading the race by 10 percentage points.

McCain's rise is clearly directly attributable to his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, which has energized the conservative base and improved his numbers among women. However, as DailyKos notes, Walter Mondale experienced a similar bump in 1984 after naming Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, jumping 16 points in the polls before going on to get slaughtered by Ronald Reagan in the election.

Anyway, polls are funny things. For instance, a new Fox News/Rasmussen poll shows the presidential race tied in Florida, which nobody expects to go for Obama.

What was that they say about the only poll that matters?

Tags: Barack Obama, Geraldine Ferraro, John McCain, Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale