I was having trouble with my email, so I went over to the RoadRunner site to get some help.  There I was confronted by a headline of truly epic stupidity:

Big Comeback for McCain?

No.  Really.  That's what it said.  Stupid picture of McCain blearily giving a thumbs-up.  Click on it and it links to a CNN story about the "tightening" of the race. 

Now, I must admit I've found it remarkable how much more likely CNN polls are to find a race "close" or "tightening" or "neck and neck" or "closing back up" than other polls and I've even fired off the occaisional snide comment.  However, I was only half serious until I read the thoughts of someone much smarter than I am about these things, specifically, the words of Sam Wang at the Princeton Electoral Consortium. 

Uncertainties such as the margin of error can be reduced by taking more samples. An individual pollster can halve the margin of error by surveying 4 times as many people. It's a square-root relationship: N samples lead to a sqrt(N)-fold reduction in uncertainty. The same is true for combining polls, with the added advantage of reducing the effects of methodological variation. Thus the value of poll-aggregation sites like this one. Meta-Analysis worked extremely well in 2004 and 2006, and is likely to do so again this year.

So why don't more pollsters or media organizations aggregate polls? The CNN Poll of Polls is a start, but it's an exception. Two forces encourage bad horserace reporting:

Competition among pollsters. It's not in the interest of individual pollsters to say "average my results with the others." It's also not advantageous to collect a larger sample once the margin of error meets industry standards.

The hungry media beast. With news budgets on the decline, it's costly to report real news. Why pay for investigative reporting when you can buy a poll and report the horserace? Within the area of poll reporting, market forces discourage high accuracy. For example, commissioning a survey of 4 times as many people would reduce uncertainty by a factor of two. But why pay 4 times as much for data that generate a lower likelihood of an apparent - and reportable - swing?

Dr. Wang was responding, specifically, to that Gallup poll that showed the race within two points that McPow was selectively gloating about on Fox yesterday.  But his point also applies to CNN polls.  And it's the point of what both Wang and Nate Silver do at their websites (even if Wang does tend to sniff a bit at Pablano's methodology).

They're both good places to go if you want to see what the polls really tell us about the race.  Wang's site tells us how many electoral votes Obama would get if the election were held today, providing an upper and lower range, along with the best guess about where it would really land.  Last time, Wang's prediction the day before the election was dead-on balls accurate (or it would have been had he not introduced an erroneous assumption about undecided voters into his math at the last minute.).  Fivethirtyeight purports to make a prediction of how many electoral votes the candidates will win on election day based upon a far more complicated, and thus far untested, methodology, but its far more entertaining than Wang's site and its got better commentary.

They're both smart guys.  I'm smart enough to more or less understand what they're doing, but nowhere near smart enough to do it myself.  I check them both every day.  Today, Fivethirtyeight predicts Obama will get 344 electoral votes. Wang projects that if the election were held today, Obama would get 364 electoral votes and, within the range of the aggregated confidence intervals says it would come in at a minimum of 330. 

Is the race tightening up a bit?  Quite possibly.  Obama predicts it and Silver seems to believe its happening, but until the electoral vote projection of either of these guys drops below, say, 300, I'm not getting dressed for the Chicken Dance. 

By the way, totally off-topic, but if you want to see my nominee for the iconic campaign photo of Campaign 2008, here it is, an AP photo from yesterday's rally in Fatalburg, er, Fayetteville that was plastered across the front page of our local rag this morning.