When asked who they wanted to send to the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections, the GOP and Democratic candidate tied at 38 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. Twenty percent of those surveyed said they didn’t know or didn’t have an answer for who they would vote for. In Quinnipiac’s last two polls, released May 1 and April 3, Democrats had been leading Republicans 41-37 and 43-35, respectively.

The unmentioned fun part is that if an equal number of votes are cast, in November 2014, for Democrats and for Republicans, that means that Republicans will win a massive wave election, easily retaining control of the House of Representatives and possibly retaking the Senate. And if that does happen no one will consider it odd or scandalous or anything.

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Obama’s popularity seems destined to slide downhill as his second term unfolds, even if polls taken just before this latest political moment show that Obama’s core supporters are still with him. Looking beyond this week’s accusatory headlines, there are a handful of single issues that will resonate among key Democratic constituencies and big-picture economic issues that seem destined to push Obama’a ratings down. He may not end his presidency in the low 20s like George W. Bush. But it’s not a stretch to say that Obama’s 51 percent approval ratings last week may be the best that he will see this term.

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Time has the details, but the top line is:

When given a choice, 61 percent of Americans say they are more concerned about the government enacting new anti-terrorism policies that restrict civil liberties, compared to 31 percent who say they are more concerned about the government failing to enact strong new anti-terrorism policies.

Only 32 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. government can prevent all major attacks, down from an average of 40 percent in 2011 and 41 percent in 2006. And by contrast with polls taken in the wake of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, when only 23 percent of voters polled showed reluctance to give up civil liberties to protect terrorism, 49 percent said they were not willing to give up such rights, as opposed to 40 percent who were.

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From Gallup:

Additionally, seven of nine former presidents have had higher retrospective approval ratings than their final job approval rating as president just before leaving office. That includes George W. Bush, who earned a 47% retrospective approval rating in the November 2010 poll, the only time Gallup has measured Bush retrospectively. That rating is 13 percentage points higher than Bush's 34% final job approval rating as president in January 2009, but similar to his overall job approval average of 49%.

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If you’re reading about politics, of course you remember the fight that took up a fair amount of space in the political press over the last month.

Most Americans, however, ignored the whole thing; even among those dimly aware of it, the memory will fade rapidly. And that suggests an important lesson for Barack Obama in this flap: Don’t worry about losing a few news cycles. If it’s just about media flaps, the president has much more room for risk-taking than he may realize.

First, the evidence. There's very limited polling, but what there is suggests no one was paying any attention. A Quinnipiac poll taken at the beginning of February found a net-unfavorable rating … but with only 14 percent liking the former Nebraska senator, 18 percent not liking him, and an overwhelming 67 percent saying that they didn’t have an opinion. That’s before either of the filibuster votes on the Senate floor, but after his well-publicized Senate hearing.

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Americans blame too much screen time and cheap fast food for fueling the nation's fat epidemic, a poll finds, but they're split on how much the government should do to help.

Most draw the line at policies that would try to force healthier eating by limiting food choices, according to the poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

A third of people say the government should be deeply involved in finding ways to curb obesity, while a similar proportion want it to play little or no role. The rest are somewhere in the middle.

Require more physical activity in school, or provide nutritional guidelines to help people make better choices? Sure, 8 in 10 support those steps. Make restaurants post calorie counts on their menus, as the Food and Drug Administration is poised to do? Some 70 percent think it's a good idea.

"That's a start," said Khadijah Al-Amin, 52, of Coatesville, Pa. "The fat content should be put up there in red letters, not just put up there. The same way they mark something that's poisonous, so when you see it, you absolutely know."

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From Time:

This doesn’t mean Kim is TIME’s Person of the Year. That choice is made by the editors of TIME and will be revealed Dec. 19 on the Today show, on TIME.com and via TIME’s Twitter handle. The poll allows readers to weigh in on the people—and things (Hello, Curiosity Rover!)—whom they think influenced the news, for better or worse, in 2012.

“While we don’t make our selection based on the poll results,” said TIME executive editor Radhika Jones in a recent interview, “it’s always interesting to see where some of our preferred candidates end up.”  (For more on how TIME editors choose the Person of the Year see our full Q&A with Jones here)

This continues Kim Jong Un's streak of winning meaningless awards this year, following his selection as The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive.

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You don't have to read too far between the lines of a statement from Gallup's editor in chief, Frank Newport, published on Friday, to get that impression.

Newport first attempts the formidable task of defending Gallup's polling accuracy during the 2012 campaign. Perhaps he was anticipating Silver's Saturday column, which labeled Gallup the most inaccurate pollster of all the firms that measured voter sentiment this year. But Silver was hardly alone in wondering why Gallup regularly reported numbers much more favorable to Romney than anyone else in 2012. We deserve an explanation a little less lame than Newport's: what's the big fuss? Gallup wasn't really off by that much.

But then it gets interesting:

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But, as Daily Dot's Aja Romano points out, this is not the first year that Businessweek has issued polls rating the attractiveness of students:

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UPDATE: Florida hasn't yet been decided, but Romney carried Alaska and Obama has officially won Nevada -- just as Silver anticipated.

A side-by-side comparison of Nate Silver's predictions with the presidential election's results so far.

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The politics clearinghouse site is the closest thing to a universally trusted source in the charged pre-election climate. It's influential poll averages projected Obama winning more than 300 electoral votes for the entire period between late January and early October (when it did not allow for toss-up states). After Obama stumbled at the Denver debate, his RCP projected total dipped as low as 277 electoral votes. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.

The latest batch of swing state polls listed at Taegan Goddard's Political Wire brought more good news for Democrats this morning. President Obama led in three out of four Florida polls, three out of four Virginia polls and in polls of Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. One North Carolina poll had the candidates tied at 49 percent.

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After parsing the difference between national polls and state polls, Fox anchor Brit Hume concludes, “It’s hard to imagine as a political journalist that all these polls are off but the discrepancy is puzzling.”

Watch:

h/t Raw Story

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This insight has been confirmed numerous times in the past few weeks, as various pundits have taken innumerate pot shots at Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger and author, who as of today estimates that President Obama has a 77.4 percent chance of winning reelection next week.

The Villager gossip site Politico has featured several criticisms from its stable of contributors, who in the great tradition of political journalism have not allowed their ignorance of a subject – in this case probability theory – to keep them from opining on it.

Behold the wit and wisdom of Josh Gerstein  and Dylan Byers: Gerstein asks, “Isn’t the basic problem with the Nate Silver prediction in question, and the critique, that it puts a percentage on a one-off event?”  Meanwhile, Byers concludes that, “should Mitt Romney win on Nov. 6, it’s difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of someone who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance of winning.”

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The frequency and outlandishness of their conspiratorial imaginations grows in sync with their desperation. With Obama leading in most polls and the election season drawing to a close, it seems like a good time to recap some of the more ludicrous conspiracies hatched by our conservative fearmongers. So with our tin-foil hats securely strapped on, let's  venture down the primrose path of hair-raising hypotheses.

1. Cooking the Unemployment Rate

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The big news, as you can see, is in the swing states. The latest poll from CBS News, The New York Times, and Quinnipiac University has Obama with a 9-point lead in Florida and a 10-point lead in Ohio. Public Policy Polling gives Obama a 7-point advantage in Iowa, and the Florida-Times Union has Obama with a more modest lead of 49 to Mitt Romney’s 46.

September 26

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