AP In the Tank For Obama

The AP conducted a poll with Yahoo! courtesy of Knowledge Networks. The polling internals are here. What the AP wrote about the poll and what the poll says are two different things. They're not even in the same ballpark. It's not even the same sport.

When it comes to the public's image of John McCain, it's as if somebody dialed the electricity down in the past month. For Barack Obama, the juice is still flowing.

People's regard for the Republican presidential nominee has deteriorated across the board since September, an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll showed Friday, with McCain losing ground in how favorably he's seen and in a long list of personal qualities voters seek in White House contenders.

Perceptions of Obama have improved or remained steady. Beyond views of the two rivals' character traits, McCain faces another problem — Obama is more trusted on the economy, the contest's commanding issue, including a 15 percentage-point edge for better grasping how the raging financial crisis is affecting people.

Obama's image has been sturdy even as voters' views of the overall campaign have tumbled since September. The portion of people saying the contest excites them has sunk to 32 percent while those calling it frustrating have grown to 41 percent — and in both cases, six in 10 of those whose feelings have worsened are McCain backers.

What the poll actually says: McCain is behind Obama by 2 points despite the oversampling of Democrats by 873 to 650 margin. Including leaners, and this is a statistical dead heat. In other words, the poll doesn't mean much to begin with, and it gets worse with how the AP twists its own results.

This is yet another example of why the polls are meaningless, and further brings into question the accuracy of the polls, the samples used, and methodologies to massage the numbers. The polls aren't just being used to explain how the public feels, but to shape public opinion, and the AP is trying to beat down McCain with a poll of dubious merit.