You may think that the recent Gallup/USA Today poll—which was the first in a long stretch of national polls to show McCain with a lead, among likely voters—is right on. You may think it’s bogus. You may think it’s the first to accurately detect a backlash against Obama. You may think it’s an anomalous outlier with a suspect method of determining “likely” voters. I’m not a pollster, and I’m not going to touch that one.
But the poll has gotten a lot of attention in the press (partly because it disagreed with another Gallup poll, the daily tracking poll). And in a followup, exploring answers in the same survey about Americans’ reactions to press coverage of the trip and the campaign, Gallup posits an interesting theory:
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of any of these changes. But the available data show that Republicans are strongly convinced that the media are much too positive in their coverage of Obama and too negative in their coverage of McCain. The media’s coverage of Obama’s foreign trip, coupled with a strong reaction from McCain and other conservatives, may have created the seemingly paradoxical effect of increasing Republicans’ energy and excitement about voting for McCain. If this is the case, the degree to which this is short-term versus long-term is still not clear.
Again, I can only guess whether this is right, or just a reach to explain Gallup’s poll numbers. But I do agree that press bias—or the effective attempt to portray the press as biased—can have unpredictable effects.