At least over at Newsweek, where their latest poll has Bush up by 5 points (50-45) in their 2-way LV matchup (50-44 in their 3-way). But here's the headline and lead of their polling release:

Bush/Cheney in Dead Heat With Kerry/Edwards in Two-Way and Three-Way Matchups Among Registered Voters

In a two-way matchup, the presidential race remains in a dead heat in the latest Newsweek Poll. Among registered voters, Bush/Cheney gets 48 percent and Kerry/Edwards 47 percent of the vote....

And here's the headline and lead of the polling story they posted on their website:

Too Close to Call: With the debates behind them, the contenders in the race for the White House remain locked in a dead heat in the latest NEWSWEEK poll

With just 17 days remaining in the race to the White House, President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry remain locked in a dead heat, according to the NEWSWEEK poll, taken after Wednesday’s final debate in Arizona. In a three-way race with Independent candidate Ralph Nader, 48 percent of all voters say they would reelect Bush while 46 percent prefer Kerry.

Good job, Newsweek! They don't even get to their LV results until the third paragraph of the above story.

As to the data themselves--leaving aside the LV issue--there are some rather odd things about it. One is that their RV sample--where the race is close to even--shows a strong swing to the Republicans in party ID, compared to Newsweek's last survey, conducted right after the first debate.

While Newsweek rather unhelpfully only provides their (demographically) unweighted party ID distributions for RVs, one can infer from other data they provide that there has been about a 6 point swing toward the Republicans in their demographically weighted party ID distributions between the two polls. That means that, if one party-weighted their current poll to match their previous party ID distribution (which was pretty close to that of the 2000 exits), the horse race results between the two polls would look remarkably similar: a 2-3 point Kerry lead.

Newsweek provides a number of interesting subgroup horse race numbers for their 3-way RV matchup that are worth taking a look at:

1. Independents favor Kerry/Edwards by 11 points, 51-40.

2. First-time voters favor Kerry/Edwards by 21, 57-36.

3. Early voters favor Kerry/Edwards by 9, 52-43.

4. Young voters (18-29) favor Kerry/Edwards by 9, 50-40, and seniors (65+) favor Kerry/Edwards by 15, 54-39.

5. Men favor K/E by 50-46 and women favor Bush-Cheney by 49-43.

Huh? Boy, I had to look over those gender breakdown data several times to make sure I wasn't seeing things. And I'm still not sure they didn't somehow mislabel their categories. But if they didn't, it's certainly a head-scratcher. Perhaps they not only oversampled Republicans in general but Republican women in particular. Who knows.

It's also interesting to note that, even with a Republican-leaning sample, the poll still gives Bush only 47 percent approval rating, basically the same as he received in their last poll. And his re-elect number, at 47 percent, is also about what he received previously.

As for the rest of the poll, it generally shows Kerry and Bush with advantages where you'd expect them to have them. However, in contrast to the Time poll I posted on earlier, Kerry's margins on given issues and attributes are smaller and Bush's larger than they were in Newsweek's previous poll. But it is difficult to assess how much of this is real movement and how much of can be attributed to the effects of a substantially more Republican sample.