There many good reasons for Democratic superdelegates to hold off on making a decision between Senators Clinton and Obama, but the national popular vote is not one of them. Over fifty years ago Jean-Paul Sartre warned us about something he called "bad faith." We are in "bad faith" when we are free to make a decision but convince ourselves that there is something preventing us from making this decision. For example, those who seek advice can be in bad faith. They say that they cannot decide until they get some good advice, knowing in advance what the advice will be.

How does this relate to the election and the so-called popular vote? Well, if we can believe a lot of pollsters and journalists, the superdelegates really want to know what the national popular vote is going to be before they can make up their minds. Until they know, they cannot choose between Clinton and Obama. But for anyone who has seen some of the (often well intentioned) attempts to calculate the national popular vote, it should be obvious that no such total will be available. There is no evil plot afoot. The simple reality is that states have chosen very different ways to select delegates. The first great divide is between caucus states and non-caucus states......

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When the Des Moines Register issued its final poll, it really was the final poll. As expected by me, Zogby is now cooking his numbers:

I told anyone who would listen I do not trust Zogby. Today we see why:

Democrat Barack Obama pulled even with Hillary Clinton in Iowa, with John Edwards close behind, in a tightening three-way race one day before the first presidential nominating contest, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. Obama gained two points overnight and Clinton lost two points to deadlock at 28 percent among Democrats in Iowa, with Edwards in a statistical dead heat behind them at 26 percent.

Is that so Mr. Zogby? Heck of a polling night January 1 ay? You would not be aligning yourself with the DMR poll now would you?

Obama, an Illinois senator, made small gains among independents and solidified his strength among younger voters . . .

Sure. Whatever you say Zogby. I do not trust the Zogby poll.

Zogby is a flat out charlatan imo. But the turnout adjustment to match the DMR poll will happen with others as well. See SV with the newly discovered Obama rise. It is human nature. They are following DMR turnout prediction lead. The good news is they are then predicting ties, as opposed to the DMR poll, which predicted an Obama win. But forget the polls now, the FINAL poll was the DMR poll.

Yesterday I predicted that Steve Beshear would beat Ernie Fletcher by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin, which as it turned out was a net six-tenths of a percent off the mark from the final tally. How did I come up with that guestimation? By examining the long-term and short-term averages of all of the public polling on the race.

Looking in-depth into all of those polls, which individual pollster performed the best? Who nailed the race? Though you might not have guessed it if you listened to the Beltway pundits and establishment types who have showered robo-pollsters with little other than derision over the years, the outfit that outshone its competitors in the Kentucky gubernatorial race was SurveyUSA. Take a look at this chart:

	(R)	(D)
	Fletcher/ Rudolph	Beshear/ Mongiardo	Margin
SurveyUSA 11/2-4	39	59	D+20
Insider Advantage (prediction)	44	56	D+12
Rasmussen Reports 11/1	39	54	D+15
Bluegrass Poll 10/26-29	33	56	D+23
Research 2000 10/22-24	40	55	D+15
Actual Results	41.3	58.7	D+17.4

So which pollster came closes to making the right prediction in this race, both in terms of margin and final spread? SurveyUSA, Rasmussen Reports and Research 2000 were all about the same amount off in the final spread (with the latter two coming 2.4 points under and the former coming 2.6 points over). But in terms of getting the exact performance of the individual candidates, SurveyUSA blew its competition out of the water, missing by a combined 2.6 points. By comparison, the next closes pollster in this regard, Research 2000, was off by a combined 5.0 points -- not by any means bad (in fact very good as these things come), but not nearly as close as SurveyUSA.

The purpose of this comparison is less about stoking the egos of the folks at SurveyUSA as it is about sending a message to some of the folks in the Beltway who disregard SurveyUSA and other pollsters who use automated rather than live interviewers that this relatively new method does work -- and at a significantly lower cost than the more traditional methods of polling. Roll Call seems to get it, contracting with SurveyUSA to poll the most competitive Senate races around the country this cycle. But to those who are still kneejerkedly skeptical about SurveyUSA and other automated pollsters, it seems that the time is now to start rethinking those sentiments.