Are the Polls Skewed Toward Obama?

Jay Cost, Weekly Standard  via Free Republic

• Conservatives regularly complain that the polls are tilted against their side, and thus favor the Democrats.
  
  They have a point.
• polls tend to oversample Democrats in a systematic fashion
• or five elections in a row – from 1984 to 2004 – the GOP fell within a very narrow, 5-point band between 34 percent and 39 percent. Meanwhile, the Democratic band was even narrower, from 37 percent to 40 percent.
• I do not see a substantial shift in the partisan balance within the electorate in 2008, at least not on net. Certainly, Barack Obama attracted a much larger number of the non-white public to the polls (especially African Americans), and he also drew a larger share of this vote than prior Democrats. But these gains were countered by significant declines in Democratic support among whites. Obama lost the white vote by 12 points; while in 1996 (an equally good year for Democrats) Bill Clinton lost it by just 3 points.
• A final point: Presidential job approval polls are usually reported among all adults, aged 18 or over. These tend to have an even larger skew toward the Democrats than registered voter polls...So, the CBS News / New York Times poll had Obama’s net approval at -2, suggesting that among the electorate it’s perhaps around -6...link this back to my consistent argument that presidents rarely win a share of the electorate larger than their job approval 

Obama is in trouble politically.  I wouldn't bet the farm on his re-election.