EmailWith our last night of interviewing complete we’re ending our ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll with our final horse race estimate unchanged at 53-44 percent, Obama-McCain. That’s among 2,304 likely voters interviewed Friday through Monday.
We’ve interviewed a total of 10,213 randomly selected adults in the last 19 days; on the odd chance you were among them, thank you. Our purpose hasn’t been to dwell on the horse race, but rather to further our understanding of how the public has come to its choices in the 2008 election – to identify the issues and candidate attributes that mattered, to measure voters’ responses to the thrust and parry of the race, to get a look inside the campaigns’ own playbooks as they’ve formed and made their appeals and to have an alternative to the spin and speculation that rush in when empirical data are absent.
Public attitudes never are more important than in national elections. Our aim at the ABC News Polling Unit this year, as in presidential elections since 1984, has been simple: Trying our best to understand them.