By mid afternoon yesterday, liberals and conservatives across the country were excitedly tweeting out the results of that new Pew Research poll that showed among likely voters, Mitt Romney now holds a four-point lead over Barack Obama in the race for the White House.
Among those conservatives were New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, who excitedly noted that the Pew poll had a 12-point reversal from one taken a few weeks earlier in support of President Obama. To his credit, Podhoretz has a column today mocking the huge slew of polls came out yesterday, many of them contradictory.
Last week Jason Zengale at New York magazine wrote a story called "The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense."
The Pew Poll also shows that Obama's 18-point lead with women over Romney is now gone. History. After one debate. Really? Maybe so. I'm not out questioning the reliability of any of these surveys — well, that's not true. I didn't believe that NY Times-CBS News/Quinnipiac survey that had the president up by 9 points over Romney in Florida. But the volatility is a bit unsettling. But you're not hearing the complaints from conservatives about the reliability of them that you were two weeks ago.
So the point is, maybe we should ignore these polls? Nah.
Today is the last day to register to vote in Florida's election four weeks from today. Yesterday it was revealed that Florida Republicans are leading the Democrats in absentee ballots requested and returned, but Democrats have the edge in new registrations.
The Tampa Tribune has new life, after an L.A. based private equity-firm spent $9.5 million to purchase the paper from Media General.
There's a post ACLU forum scheduled for tonight in Tampa on how civil liberties were dealt with during August's RNC, and Gloria Steinem will be among those speaking about voting at an event in St. Pete on October 20.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2012.