denBeste, who's pretentious intellectuosity has always seemed more hot air than the balloon can ever handle, has a some kind of a chart that purports to show that Kerry is losing steam over the long trend line. Or some such shit. That a smart guy like Wretchard at The Belmont Club buys into it is even more disturbing. And the charge that respected polling people deliberately manipulated data is absurd. DenBeste just doesn't have anything to write about. BTW, Rasmussen did admit that something went wrong with his polling over a one or two day period, but he polls every day and he is very straight up.

"The past is never a true indicator for the future." Everybody who tracks any market knows this. A chart, a trend, a graph, etc., can only show what happened. Period. All representations of past data only focus on the data, not on the situations or occurrences that caused that data. It seems that Bush suffered huge damage from the first debate, but it can also be argued that he got a disproportionate bounce from the GOP convention.

The only thing you can derive from the polls TODAY is that Bush appears to be ahead and that the race is very close. Period. To apply momentum, moving averages, and all the other crap is just that. Crap. An election poll is not a stock market or a poker game. A poll takes data from different people every week or every day. There is no constant. The last two weeks of this campaign are going to be dirty as hell. Remember the Bush DUI that came out five days before November of 2000, a charge that totally wiped out a decent Bush lead.

We won't know anything til the votes are counted, which means keep working.