(Newser)
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Stats wiz Nate Silver has some serious doubts about Bloomberg's new poll showing President Obama with a 13-point lead over Mitt Romney. Silver's own analysis has Obama with just a slim lead over Romney, and little has changed over the past two weeks, he writes in his New York Times blog. Indeed, it's been a relatively quiet election cycle—and even the killing of Osama Bin Laden offered only a "relatively modest" effect on Obama's favorability ratings.
So don't "attribute deep meaning" to the Bloomberg findings, Silver cautions. Yes, it was conducted by a fairly reliably polling firm, but "some polls just aren’t very good, taking shortcut after shortcut" until they no longer reflect the voting public. Many news organizations blew the poll's importance out of proportion following what had been considered a rough few weeks for the president. Such overreacting "usually begets an equal and opposite overreaction later on"—so expect similar surprises for Romney before November.
