Over the weekend we wrote about the latest ABC / Washington Post "goal seeking" report that showed a 12-point lead for Hillary. The "poll" took advantage of all the usual gimmicks to engineer the blowout Hillary lead including a 9% "oversample" of democrats versus republicans (which, as we've pointed out numerous times, does not reflect the reality of the true voter registration gap). Conveniently, the 12-point lead was released just in time for the Sunday political talk shows which all had a field day boasting about the results.

Ironically, just two days after showing a landslide victory for Hillary, ABC and Wapo now see a much tighter race with her 12-point lead being cut in half to just 6 points. So, you tell us...did voters suddenly have a massive change of heart, in just two days, on no incremental news? Or, did ABC / Wapo have other reasons to "goal seeking" a 12-point lead over the weekend? Certainly, it seems convenient that a controversial poll reflecting a massive lead for Hillary would be "embargoed" for release to just prior to the start of the busy Sunday political talk shows while more "realistic" polls would be released just days later, in the middle of the week, without the same mainstream media fanfare.

Another interesting takeaway is how ABC/Wapo voters don't seem to react to news flow. For example, their polling data showed no change in support for Hillary after her 9/11 "medical episode" (in contrast to almost every other poll that reflected a massive decline in support) while Trump seemingly lost multiple points and then mysteriously regained them in recent days on minimal incremental news.

Here is a graphical representation of the historical ABC / Wapo poll results...notice anything odd?

Of course, part of the issue is that, after incurring a lot of criticism for their 9-point democrat "oversample" in the weekend poll, ABC/Wapo decided to narrow that gap to just 6-points in their most recent poll. Ironically, when you decrease the democrat oversample, the lead for the democratic candidate also declines...odd.

In the end, while we can't say exactly what is driving these wild variations in polling results, the only thing we know for certain is that it has very little to do with actual voter preferences.