Before obsessing about Zogby's latest tracking poll, read Nate Silver's analysis of how "his topline numbers are unusable"

Yeah, yeah - Zogby has a new poll that shows McCain catching up. Don't believe it.

As the election draws closer, we're probably all even more obsessive about checking the daily tracking polls for movement. I get my daily emails from Rasmussen, Gallup and Diageo/Hotline. Every day, among the many excellent posts at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver analyzes the day's national and state polls. So, I can rely on Nate to make sense of what it all means. Today, he provided some critical insight into what we should infer from Zogby:

The national tracking polls are actually in pretty good agreement with one another, with IBD/TIPP, Research 2000, Gallup, and Hotline all settling in the 5-7 point range. Zogby is the outlier at Obama +2.7, and that's because Zogby has the odd practice of fixing his poll's party identification weights based on what they were in the last presidential election. In Zogby's world, then, it's still 2004, when there were roughly as many Republicans as Democrats. Although Zogby's trendlines may be worth looking at, his topline numbers are basically unusable.

Trust Nate.

You may remember that Zogby called the election for John Kerry at around 5:00 PM Eastern on Election day in 2004. If it's still 2004 for Zogby, I'm not stressing about Zogby's new numbers. And, if the Republicans want to think this election is going to have the same party ID as 2004, well, I'm looking forwarding to seeing who's right on election day.