According to the Zogby International Poll, Senator Barack Obama is up +8% versus McCain as of today’s (10/21) data release. However, just this past Sunday Obama was up by only +3% points.

One distinguishing characteristic about the Zogby poll is that they weight down responses from Democrats to fit the general population of voters. The CBS/New York Times poll which has Obama with the largest margin at 12% (as of 10/14), actually has more registered Independents (33%) in their weighted sample than registered Republicans (29%), with Democrats at 38%. Naturally this composition would would yield more of a pro-Obama outcome. CNN’s polling is actually done by Opinion Research Corporation, and I was not able to find the political breakdown of their survey respondents.

Needless to say that the popular polls that most people hear spouted on the evening news are fatally flawed. I do think that Zogby might be the best because they’re in this business year after year, although they’ve missed a few big ones too. As I’ve stated previously, I don’t think we have the research tools to fully understand what’s happening in this election, simply because it’s very difficult to measure attitudes that people want to hide. For example, some have commented that the Internet would not exist if it didn’t have porn available given the volume of traffic to adult content. However, most respondents in Internet research studies deny visiting adult sites.

On the issue of the Bradley effect, John Zogby (Founder of Zogby International), says that he thinks it has already been taken into account within the current polling numbers. While I do think that we’ve seen some outright racist and xenophobic remarks, there are still plenty of voters who don’t want to give us the satisfaction of admitting that they have no credible reason other than race not to vote for Senator Obama.

Whether Barack is up by +5% or +8%, is a single digit lead enough two weeks out for an Obama win? I hope so…we’ll just have to keep watching!