The Independent’s sister site in Washington notes that GOP presidential candidate John McCain is struggling in his home state. An online Zogby poll conducted June 11-30 concluded that the McCain trails Barack Obama 42 to 39 percent in Arizona.

 

At first blush, that seems hard to believe.

 

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that Obama will win a landslide victory come November. A historic electoral smackdown in the mold of the one George H.W. Bush dished out to Michael Dukakis in 1988 where he won 40 of 50 states. Or maybe Obama will repeat LBJ’s epic 1964 domination of Barry Goldwater — 61 to 38 percent.

 

Interestingly enough, in both of those presidential landslides, both losers won their home states — Dukakis won Massachusetts, and Goldwater won, yes, Arizona.

 

Of course, Obama might make more than one kind of history and thrash McCain so bad he loses his home state. It could happen. Anything’s possible.

 

Perhaps not willing to contemplate that dark scenario, the McCain campaign didn’t want to discuss the new poll with the Washington Independent. But the campaign did talk to the hometown Arizona Republic:

 

The Arizona Republic reported Thursday that McCain’s campaign called the Zogby poll a "fraud" and questioned the methodology of Internet polling. "John McCain has won every campaign he has run in Arizona, and he will win in November," Kurt Davis, Arizona McCain ‘08 co-chairman, told the newspaper.

 

The McCain camp’s "fraud" assertion raises an interesting question. Zogby claims that it randomly sampled 1,142 registered voters online. Fritz Wentzel, Zogby’s director of communications, defended  the methodology of the poll to the Washington Independent’s John Dougherty this way:

 

Wentzel said the sampling is carefully controlled to mirror the percentage of voters registered as Democrats, Republicans and Independents. The online survey is followed up with a telephone validation survey of 2 percent of the online respondents. Strict controls are also employed to prevent survey participants from voting multiple times under different names. “It’s highly controlled," Wentzel said, "and it’s a very scientific process.”

 

Wentzel said the significant difference between the Zogby poll showing Obama leading Arizona while other polls have McCain up by about 10 percentage points can be attributed to Zogby’s focus on likely voters as opposed to registered voters.

 

Again, seems hard to believe. A visit to Zogby’s survey methodology page doesn’t really explain how exactly they manage to randomly and accurately sample those "likely" voters. This is all it really says:

 

A sampling of Zogby International’s online panel, which is representative of the adult population of the US, was invited to participate. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, income and gender to more accurately reflect the population. The margin of error is +/- 0.5 percentage points. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.

 

Not sure who’s a member of "Zogby International’s online panel," but sounds important! Seriously, it makes perfect sense that Obama would have an edge with likely voters who spend a lot of time online. Sophisticated — in person — exit polling from Obama’s primary wins bear that out.

 

Combine that with the fact that nearly every other Arizona presidential preference poll to date gives McCain a healthy lead at this stage of the game and you’ve got one suspect Internet poll.