The telephone poll of 717 likely voters, conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc., has a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points, meaning there is a 95 percent probability that McCain’s lead in Kentucky is as much as 19.4 percentage points, or as little as 4.6 percentage points.

It was conducted Sept. 22-25 — before Friday night’s first presidential debate, and as the Bush administration and Congress worked on a financial-industry bailout in the midst of what some analysts consider the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.