re: #176 engineer cat

as i said before, “within” is not “ahead”, and obama is ahead in ohio if you go by an average of all polls

real clear politics has obama ahead by average in ohio by 2.3%, but romney only 1% “ahead” in the national poll average.

what’s your thought on that?

and, as i also said before, if you throw out all states that are “within”, by your standard, obama still leads in the electoral college among the states that are left

Margin of error is most meaningful for a single poll. If you’re taking multiple samplings, and the results are pretty much the same, then your confidence grows that the result actually reflects the population.

Now, the methodology is different from different polling outfits, but if you’re getting 5-7 outfits all getting the same results, you would be on solid ground to say that Obama has a narrow lead. You’d be on much less solid ground to say that this is tied.