McCain pollsters: Obama lead not that big

WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign says that polls that give presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama a big lead are skewed.

Obama, D-Ill., had a 12-point lead in a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released Tuesday, with 49 percent of respondents saying they would vote for him and 37 percent for McCain. McCain's pollsters argue that the survey was biased toward Democrats, The Boston Globe reports.

The pollsters say that the sample had an unusually wide gap between the parties, with 39 percent identifying themselves as Democrats, 27 percent as independents and 22 percent as Republicans, with another 12 percent giving no party, a number the pollsters also said was high. In a memo, the pollsters said that a less-biased sample would still give Obama a lead but a much smaller one.

"McCain's double-digit deficit is not a reflection of reality, simply a result of an unusual party identification result in this survey," they told the Globe.

The pollsters also said that the absence of demographic information like age made the results difficult to analyze. They found similar problems with a recent Newsweek poll that gave Obama a 15-point lead.