Reply #18: That's great to see

[Time for change]

My Google search missed that.

I looked at the four polls (from you link) that were taken during the same time frame, in comparison with the previous poll:

Gallup: -7
Diego/Hotline: -9
CNN: -4
CBS/NY Times: +5

That's still an overall decline from the previous poll of about 4 percentage points, averaged over 4 polls. So it seems to me that overall there is still some support for my theory - but this does weaken it quite a bit. Also, it's hard to dismiss it completely when all the different components fit together so perfectly, and when we don't have a lot of trend information on the other polls.

And then there is the Newsweek poll a week later, which shows no change from the previous poll - which would suggest that if there was a decline for the Dems due to the terror scare, they very well may have recovered from it already. And also, it's good to see that even though the baseline for the Gallup poll had been favoring the Dems quite a bit, the other polls had been favoring them even more so.

This does seem quite bizzare though, that we have somewhat substantial declines in the three polls while the CBS/NY Times poll is showing a 5 point improvement. That seems way beyond the range of statistical probability.