Political Polling by the Numbers: Is McCain Really Leading?

So today Drudge linked to a Zogby poll that shows John McCain leading Barack Obama by five points. Regular Fishbowl readers will know that we are not so good with numbers — all things being equal we are more than happy when someone else does the math for us, so obviously we jumped on Peter Feld’s piece over at Gawker that breaks the “scary” numbers down for us.

It’s more reliable to examine each candidate’s numbers separately, rather than focusing on the gap between them, as the media always does (“McCain up by 5!” “Obama up 2!”).