Daily Presidential Polling Update 5/21/08

Sorry for not having done one of these daily updates in a long time, but the combination of a hard drive failure and a paucity of polling data threw up a temporary roadblock. Anyway, since looking over old election data from presidential campaigns in the past revealed that even in "two-way" races the various minor candidates still earn a single percentage point for their combined efforts. Therefore I've factored in this third party effect in the projected popular vote by setting aside 1% (sometimes .9% or 1.1% due to rounding) for spoiler candidates. For the time being this total includes both former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, the likely Libertarian nominee, and Ralph Nader. If any third party candidate reaches three percent in the national averages I'll start including them separately, albeit with penalties factored in to compensate for the tendency of independent candidates to over-poll.

Also, I've decided that if there are five or less polls in the Real Clear Politics averages, I will simply use those numbers to determine the projected popular vote instead of throwing out the high and low numbers. However if there are six or more polls in the current database, I will continued removing those numbers. 

Projected Popular Vote: Obama +4.6

Obama  51.8

McCain 47.2

Others      1.0

Raw Popular Vote: Obama +4.2

Obama  47.5 (47-48)

McCain 43.3 (40-45)

Tracking Polls Only

Obama  46

McCain 45

Raw Polling Data

Obama 48-40 (Reuters/Zogby 5/15-5/18)

Obama 47-44 (Gallup Tracking 5/16-5/20)

McCain 45-44 (Rasmussen Tracking 5/17-5/20)

Obama 48-46 (Democracy Corps 5/13-5/15)

Obama 47-40 (Quinnipiac 5/8-5/12)

Obama 51-44 (ABC/Washington Post 5/8-5/11)

Thrown Out Numbers

Obama:  51 (ABC/Washington Post), 44 (Rasmussen Tracking)

McCain: 46 (Democracy Corps), 40 (Reuters/Zogby)