The The Glittering Eye and Paul at Wizbang are trying to grok the meaning of the latest polling trends.

gEye thinks that he sees periodic jump for Kerry in as a result of Sunday talk damage control by Camp Kerry. Perhaps, but on balance the long-term trend is for tracking polls to favor the Democrats over weekends, so that may be what he is seeing. He also thinks that the over trend is Bush. Of course, as I noted the other day, while the RCP graph makes the Kerry-Bush gap look large, the fact of the matter is that that scale is so small it amplies that gap.

Paul looks at the WaPo tracking poll and thinks that Kerry’s lead was the result of the initial al-QaQaa story and the susequent flip back to Bush illustrates the expiration of that story’s power. Again, given that the Kerry surge started as weekend numbers were included, that may be the explanation. Further, the variation is so small (the biggest gap in the last week has been 3 points) it may be that that is nothing more than MOE variations. While it is likely that the al-QaQaa story is affecting voters, one wonders how many it can actualyl sway.

The bottom line for any and all analyses of these numbers: the margins are so small, I am not that any given variation that is within the MOE can be considered significant–nor can it likely be explained by any specific event or issue.

Update: Another thought occurred to me in regards to the WaPo tracking poll: the Kerry surge actually starts well before the explosives story. Further, given that it is three-day tracking poll, the full effect of the explosives story doesn’t register in the poll until later in the week. Really, by the time the story was fully in the consciousness of the news-consuming pubic, the numbers tunr a bit more Bush-ish. No, I don’t think that the surge Kerry got early the week of the 25th is attributable to the explosives story.