ABC News has reported on its new poll with the Washington Post, and in a desperate attempt to maintain the narrative that the race between President Obama and Mitt Romney is still a dead heat, has run with the headline:

Obama Gains a Convention Boost - But Not Among Likely Voters

This is based on their poll's finding that Obama now leads Romney nationally by a healthy 50% to 44% among Registered Voters, but the margin shrinks to only 49-48 when they apply their Likely Voter filter. Never mind that even the LV result shows a 3-point bounce for Obama compared with their own previous poll, that's within the margin of error, so the race is still tied. Also never mind that their entire sample of only 826 RVs has an error margin of 4%, and they don't bother to tell us how many of those RVs turned out to be LVs, which probably raises their MOE to 6% or higher for the lesser sample. They want to show a dead-heat, and they do.

HOWEVER, the big headline, which ABC buries deep in the 5th paragraph of the story, so as not to distract from their narrative, is that their own poll shows that Obama is wiping up the floor with Romney in the key Battleground States:



Additionally, there's been a shift in preferences in the eight tossup states identified by the ABC News Political Unit: Registered voters in these states now favor Obama over Romney by 54-40 percent, vs. 42-48 percent in these same states before the party conventions.

Come on, guys, admit it: that's not a "shift of preferences," that's a 20-point earthquake! And it puts the lie to your spin that the race remains "wide open"... The President is up by 14 points on average across the critical battleground states? That's landslide territory! That's a blowout of historic proportions!

Pretty soon, the Trad Med are going to have to start rethinking their fetish for predicting a tight race, and retool their narratives toward prognosticating about the Second Obama Term. Or they'll just (continue to) look like idiots.