Since we're breathlessly reading the tea leaves in every single poll, Rasmussen also notes that Obama's favorability has inched ahead of McCain's for the first time in a couple of weeks.

Definitely noise.

Actually, Abramowitz is co-author of the second piece as well as author of the first.

Um, Mick, do you guys read Silver?   Love your political analysis, but maybe you should leave the number-crunching and the analysis of that to the dude who invented PECOTA.  

Historically, except for the big incumbent landslide years--1964, 1972, 1984--when the outcome was obvious to everyone with any sense by late spring at the latest, polls in the summer have had very little to do with the final outcome.  Very little reason for Obama backers to worry or McCain backers to get their hopes up.

Alternative places to RCP to "get your full poll fix": Pollster.com and of course, the site of fellow TNR writer Nate Silver, www.fivethirtyeight.com.

(I mean, how weird is it that Crowley is plugging a conservative site that merely catalogues polling, rather than the site of his own colleague, which does the same and includes much in-depth numbercrunching to go with it?)

RCP is fine, mind you, if you can stomach the plentiful links to conservative punditry and ads for rightwing t-shirts; it does a commendable job archiving poll results. Its running averages are useful too. Not as useful as Pollster.com's trendlines though, which go beyond just averaging out the last X polls and come with instructive analysis. Or as Nate Silver's site.

Btw, I am a total polls nut.. I find them fascinating. But even I start having doubts when there's no less than eight separate posts about polls on the combined front pages of the Plank and Stump.