[SfN] Gallup Poll

[John Paul Schmit]

Steven,
 There are a wide variety of polls available that you can check on the
interntet. Most of these polls are "tracking polls". When a firm conducts a
tracking poll what they do is call a certain number of people every day, and
then add up a number, usually 3, days worth of polling and give the running
total evey day. The trakcing polls I know of are:

www.cnn.com (The gallup poll) - check it out in the politics section
www.voter.com - The battleground poll, run by a democratic and a republican
pollter
www.zogby.com - The zogby poll
www.portraitofamerica.com - The protrait of America poll

Here is today's results for each poll
Gallup - Bush 50%, Gore 41%, Nader 3% error +/- 4%
Battleground - Bush 44%, Gore 39%, Nader 5% error +/- 3.1%
Zogby - Bush 44%, Gore 42%, Nader 5%, error ?
Portriat - Bush 46.7%, Gore 41.3%, Nader 3.6% error rate +/- 1.8%

In short - in every poll, Bush wins and in general he has been imporving
steadily since the beginning of the debates. If the election were held today,
Bush would win. That being said, the major news outlets: www.cnn.com,
www.msnbc.com, and  www.abcnews.go.com all say that Illinois is one of the
states that Gore will win, that is it is not a tossup state. These sights all
have maps where they lump the states into Bush, Gore, or tossup states.

Someone may fear that if Bush continues to expand his lead, Illinois will
become a tossup state in the next few days, much the same way the Minnesota
and Maine are now tossup states when before they were Gore states. That might
happen, but if Bush continues to pull  a head, states that are now tossups,
such as New Hampshire, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkinsas and Nevada will
go for Bush, so Gore will have no hope. In short, Gore needs to win Illinois
to be president, but if it gets to the point where he might loose Illinois, he
will have already lost enougth other states to lose the election. So, you can
voter for Nader with impunity in Illinois, Gore is ahead by eight points, and
I don't think that Nader will gain the additional eight points from Gore to
change the outcome. Nader has 4 now, so he would need well over 12% of the
vote to hurt Gore.

Hope this helps.
John Paul