Closing….(Obama over McCain 44 percent to 42 percent.)

Imagine you conducted a Presidential Poll. Imagine you wrote several headline articles about it. Now let’s take it into surreal territory. Let’s say for the heck of it – you didn’t even bother publishing the actual result.

Just in case you think thought this hokey little thought game up in the throes of an angry heroin fix, I didn’t. The Associated Press did it for me. They just finished publishing John McCain’s electoral obituary in their descriptive write up, but never got around to actually stating their numbers.

The poll has it Obama 44 – McCain 42 – Undecided/3rd Party – 14. It was based on polling 841 Likely Voters. These included 373 Democrats, 252 Republicans and 214 Independents. This would be an electorate with 44.3% Democrats, 30% Republicans, and 25.7% Independent.

Here’s how AP describes McCain’s near victory amongst a poll sample that could easily replicate what we’ll see in Fairfax County, Virginia on the 4th of November.

When it comes to the public's image of John McCain, it's as if somebody dialed the electricity down in the past month. For Barack Obama, the juice is still flowing.

If he can’t do better in a sample with a 14.3 % party ID advantage, that juice you see flowing from Obama is his campaign's life-blood. If Northern VA is Blue by fewer than 15%, McCain takes The Old Dominion. If Jack Murtha’s “racist” Congressional District is Blue by less than 15%, Obama would be Swahili for “Badly Burned Toast.”

I’m getting the sense of something happening here. Being the nerd that I am; I started nerding around with the RCP Average for the 2008 Presidential Election. As a straight arithmetic mean, it stands at Obama + 6.8.

Looking at the set of averaged results gives me the following (numbers denote Obama’s lead in a given poll) {4, 5, 10, 4, 2, 6, 3, 9, 14, 4, 7, 7}. Out of that set, the following members denote polls ending on 15 or 16 Oct. (Most recent data) {4, 5, 10, 4, 2, 6, 3}. The following members indicate data taken from polls ending no more recently than 13 Oct. (Slightly older data.). {9, 14, 4, 7, 7}.

Now we look at what happens if we only average the five older polls. You get a summed lead of 41 points for Obama, divided by five. This gives Senator Obama a lead of 8.2%.

Now we look at what happens when we take the same straight average of polls ending on 15 or 16 Oct. Adding the leads gives us 34. Dividing that number by 7 (sample size) gives us roughly 4.9%. Senator McCain has gained approximately 3.3% in the last 3 or 4 days.

This is without the poll that AP wrote the obfuscatory article about. Adding that to the entire sample would give us a set that looks like this {2,4, 5, 10, 4, 2, 6, 3, 9, 14, 4, 7, 7}. This makes the RCP average look like 5.9%.

It’s getting closer. John McCain is far, far from done. Don’t go John Galt. Go vote instead!