Shocker! McCain Campaign Disputes WaPo Poll

I reported earlier that Barack Obama has taken a 9 point polling lead over John McCain in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. You might have expected the McCain campaign to congratulate Senator Obama on how well he is doing, and vow to fight on with their vision for America. You would be wrong.

The McCain campaign held a conference call today, in which they pushed back at the results of this poll. From Chris Cillizza's The Fix:

At the crux of McInturff's argument was the fact that the Democratic party identification in the Post poll was 16 points higher than the Republican identification -- a far larger margin than the Democratic ID edge in other recent public polling.

Jon Cohen, the Post's polling director, explained that the actual party ID numbers among likely voters had Democrats plus six points. It was only when people who offer no original party ID were asked whether they leaned one direction or the other that the number jumped to Democrats +16. (ABC's polling director has more here.)

This kind of pushback is de rigeur for political campaigns, so we shouldn't be as quick as Rumproast to call McCain a Wahhhmbulance, but then again, we didn't hear them complaining about the outlier poll from September 7 that had McCain up by 10.

Tommy Christopher co-hosts "Unusable Signal" , on BlogTalkRadio Tues & Thur at 9pm, and Wed, Fri, & Sat at 11pm. Click here for the Unusable Signal homepage.