Itz News to Me

I left this in the comments at Ace’s place:

FWIW, here’s my prediction of where things go from here:

I think there’s going to be a deal. That deal will include at least a nod to the plan put forth by House Republicans and helps put some of the pain on Wall Street rather than Main Street. [Dems don’t want a deal without cover from House Republicans so they’re going to give them something, maybe not much substantial, but enough that McCain can claim a victory and House Republicans have something to take home to their constituents to say “Hey, we did the best we could for you.]

House Republicans will publicly thank McCain for fighting to make sure that the Average Joe was protected. The MSM will try their damnedest to spin another story, but McCain is able to get his message directly to the people at the debate (which he will participate in Friday night) before they can get their spin machine in top gear and before Axelrod can give Obama a full set of talking points with which to respond.

Expect the Obama campaign to go back into all-day, every-day smear mode (a la the initial reaction to Palin) ASAP. Internal polls are going to look awful for them, so the flop sweat of desperation is going to begin showing in a big way.

I see McCain up in Gallup and Rasmussen by +3 or more by the end of next week….

I may wind up right or wrong, but unlike Obama at least I’m willing to commit to a position one way or the other…

Popularity: 22%

Over at Patterico, he reports on the latest Presidential polls which includes a Rasmussen report showing a dead heat between McCain and Obama.

But as I commented there, there’s a big problem with Rasmussen’s methodology in this poll:

If you read the full Rasmussen report, you see the following caveat:

For a variety of reasons, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll is less volatile than some other polls and always shows a somewhat smaller convention bounce than reported by others. This is primarily because we weight our results by party identification (see methodology). Looking at the data before adjusting for partisan identification, the Republican convention appears to have created a larger surge in party identification than the Democratic convention the week before. If this lasts, it could have a significant impact on Election 2008.

After running it through the secret decoder ring, this reads:

we’ve seen a significant swing in party self-indication towards the GOP since the convention, but we’re going to wait and see if that continues before we start including that factor into our regular polling adjustments.

Basically, they’re admitting that their current poll results aren’t accurately reflecting what the mood in the country is right now: rather it’s a projection based on a “what if” scenario that requires the Republican base to return to its previously demoralized state. Unlike Gallup, they’re actively factoring out the uptick in Republican enthusiasm rather than simply reporting it.

Barring some major problem with Palin, I’d bet that the Rasmussen polls start moving towards McCain as they will have no choice but to accept that the swing in party self-identification isn’t just a one week phenomenon and correct their current “tweaking” of the raw data.

Popularity: 21%