Marc Ambinder (whose reporting has been must-read) and Mark Blumenthal offer nuggets from an on-the-record briefing by David Plouffe.
From Ambinder:
Barack Obama's margin among independent swing-voting women and sporadically voting Democrats are two of the main metrics his campaign is closely monitoring, Obama's election manager, David Plouffe, said today.
Plouffe, speaking to reporters, editors and executives of the Atlantic Media company in a throwback conference room in downtown Denver, said that Obama's internal polling suggests that McCain runs a double-digit deficit with this group runs into the double digits in some swing states. "And that's before they know about his position on choice and that he's against equal pay," Plouffe said.
Voters, he said, were treated to an "a ha!" moment last week when McCain couldn't recall the number of houses he owned and suggested that earning $5 million a year would not make a person rich.
"The development on the out of touch argument is an actually critical development of the campaign," he said, because "[s]ome of the voters images of McCain don't jibe with reality."
From Blumenthal, focusing on polling:
Plouffe also emphasized that the internal polling the campaign does is focused on those same 18 states, and that their real concern is not the horse race results but the "data underneath." Later, he added, "the top-line [polling data] doesn't tell you anything." Rather, they focus on who the "true undecideds" are, "how they are going to break," and what messages will best persuade them.
The Gallup Daily tracking poll is apparently a particular sore point. When asked whether they were unhappy that the Biden announcement had not produced a bounce in national polls, Plouffe shot back: "How would we know . . . from the Gallup Daily?" The Gallup Daily is "something we don't pay attention to," he said again.
Communications director Dan Pfieffer later put it more bluntly, expressing unhappiness with the "inordinate focus on bad polling" by the media and also in the routine misinterpretation of sampling noise in the Gallup Daily poll. "The Gallup Daily is the worst thing that's happened in journalism in 20 years," he said.
Meanwhile, the worst thing that's happened in journalism in 20 years has Obama back on top by 1.
As mentioned, interviewing by Gallup on Tuesday night showed a stronger Obama performance, which could augur the beginnings of a bounce for Obama, as is evident more often than not immediately after a candidate's convention. Gallup's official "post-convention bounce" reading on Obama's support will be based on interviewing conducted Friday through Sunday.
Atlantic Media should have more later on the briefing. For example:
"If he does pick Romney, what a duo! It's the greatest job killing machine in the history of American politics. Mitt Romney is an expert on Cayman Island tax shelters. You couldn't have a more out of touch ticket."
