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Gallup Daily Tracking: Obama Ahead By 5 Percent

Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief in Politics.
Aug 9th, 2008 | View Comments

The latest Gallup Daily Tracking poll continues to show that neither Democratic Sen. Barack Obama or Republican Sen. John McCain has shaken up the race enough to take a significant lead — a finding notable in other polls as well. Obama has a 5 percent lead, but the race appears basically deadlocked.

Gallup reports:

The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update finds Barack Obama with a 47% to 42% lead over John McCain, when registered voters are asked for whom they would vote if the presidential election were held today.

These results are based on a three-day rolling average of interviews conducted Aug. 6-8, with Gallup polling roughly 900 registered voters nationwide each night. The numbers for each of these nights have been similar, suggesting preferences are stable.

Rasmussen doesn’t see any politically seismic shifts, either:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that the race for the White House is tied—Barack Obama and John McCain each attract 44% of the vote. When “leaners” are included, it’s McCain 47% and Obama 46%. With leaners, the candidates have been within one point of each other for nine straight days….

McCain leads by nineteen points among White Men and by eight points among White Women. Obama leads 94% to 5% among African-American voters and by twenty-one points among Hispanic voters…..

McCain is currently viewed favorably by 54% of the nation’s voters, Obama by 53%. …Voters see stark differences between Obama and McCain on two key issues of Election 2008—Iraq and Energy.

As always, it’s important to put these polls into context by going to THIS PAGE on Pollster.com and look at how these numbers compare to other polls.

If you look at Pollster’s overall polling chart, you can see how Obama has begun to slightly dip — and McCain has begun to quickly rise:

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GeorgeSorwell

I was going to say what Elrod said, but I'd like to take it a step farther.

For weeks there's been an implication that Obama is showing weakness. But since you were good enough to provide a link to Pollster.com, I went there to look at the numbers.

A CBS poll taken from 7/31-8/5/08 shows McCain at 39%.

An Economist poll from 7/28-29/08 shows McCain at 37%.

A Research2000 poll from 7/25-27/08 shows McCain at 39%.

The previous Economist poll, taken from 7/22-24/08, shows McCain at 38%.

A FOX poll from 7/22-23/08 shows McCain at 37%.

Scrolling down further to the beginning of July, McCain comes up in a variety of polls at 36, 39, 37, 35, 38 and 34%.

I am not a statistician. McCain may be maintaining a rough parity with Obama--within the margin of error.

But I noticed that nearly all the polls showing McCain doing 45% or better are coming a single source--Rasumssen. (I only spotted one exception--a USA Today poll showing McCain with a whopping 49%) Maybe Rasmussen has a consistently better model than all the others.

But it seems to me that without all those (very frequent!) Rasmussen results, McCain is pretty far down.

I doubt the usefulness of polls taken this early. Dukakis was way ahead of the first President Bush in the summer of 1988. Perot was ahead of Bill Clinton at this point is 1992. A very authoritative-seeming article was published by Slate in 2000 claiming "Bush is toast". So I understand that our dumb media doesn't want to be caught flatfooted by portraying Obama with an insurmountable lead.

But McCain is consistently doing very poorly indeed--often less than 40%.

elrod

So, in other words, nothing has changed. Rasmussen shows a closer race because they adjusted their partisan ID model; they nudged Democrats down 2 points. Whether that's accurate or not is hard to say. But it does explain the tightening from a consistent Obama lead of 3 to a lead of 1.

Obviously Gallup has seen no reason to change its partisan ID model at this point.

This race will remain static until the conventions.

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