* I’m still sick as heck. But I’m so weirded out about this new Chicago Tribune poll showing Gov. Pat Quinn leading Bruce Rauner 48-37 that I had to post something. I’m just going to point out two things because I’m nowhere near up to strength.

* First, the poll was taken using registered voters…

The poll, conducted Sept. 3 through Friday by APC Research Inc., featured interviews on landlines and cellphones with 800 registered voters.

I don’t know anybody polling registered voters in mid-September. Everybody is polling likely voters.

Also, the universe of registered voters is always going to skew more Democratic than the universe of likely voters (hence the Democratic Party’s huge push to increase turnout this year), so that explains a lot.

* Secondly…

Helping fuel Quinn’s early advantage was the poll’s finding that 43 percent of voters identified themselves as Democrats while only 24 percent called themselves Republicans and 28 percent said they were independents. The partisan split is identical to a Tribune poll in fall 2008, when home state Democrat Barack Obama made his first bid for the White House, and also represents a high-water mark for Democrats in Illinois in a nonpresidential year since 1998.

Everyone who thinks that this is an Obama ‘08 wave year in Illinois, please raise your hand.

The Tribune’s polls have been pretty good over the years. They were the first to point out how close the governor’s race really was in 2010, for instance. But this one, I’m afraid, appears to be a flawed outlier.