Dead Cat Bounce
I don't usually report on the minutia of politics or polling, mainly because it bores me to tears, but I had to make this post because it lets me use one of my all-time favorite terms. Bush's recent rise in the polls reminds me very much of that great investment term "dead cat bounce." (If it falls far enough, even a dead cat will bounce). I've always suspected that many of the technical analysis used on Wall Street to analyze stock trends could be applied to political polls, since they encompass some of the same group distributed consensus building. I can see it now, Paul Kangas reporting that President Bush is experiencing a break-out to the upside...
By the way, are there really people who change their opinion about the war, about the president, about how they will vote on a weekly basis? It sure seems like there are 5-10% of Americans who blow around with the wind. I don't mean change your mind once, like changing your mind on the war. I mean back and forth every week. Otherwise, how does one explain the fluctuation in the polls, particularly when the amount of the fluctuation is outside the error range?
