Polls: McCain Palin Winning Strong Support From Independent And Women Voters

Polls now show that Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and his Vice Presidential running mate Gov. Sarah Palin are winning the crucial battles for independent and women voters — big-time.

The polls show Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama is not just sagging in these areas but politically bleeding — and losing the support of some critically-needed conservative Democrats as well. If this is just part of the McCain bounce, Democrats shouldn’t worry. But it could reflect more profound shifts due to the make up of the GOP ticket, Palin and McCain’s speeches, and the fact that the Republicans remain far more unified than the Democrats — a party that has not totally rounded up Hillary Clinton supporters. And Clinton continues to hold her fire on Palin.

Gallup Reports:

John McCain’s 6 percentage-point bounce in voter support spanning the Republican National Convention is largely explained by political independents shifting to him in fairly big numbers, from 40% pre-convention to 52% post-convention in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.

By contrast, Democrats’ support for McCain rose 5 percentage points over the GOP convention period, from 9% to 14%, while Republicans’ already-high support stayed about the same.

The surge in political independents who favor McCain for president marks the first time since Gallup began tracking voters’ general-election preferences in March that a majority of independents have sided with either of the two major-party candidates. Prior to now, McCain had received no better than 48% of the independent vote and Obama no better than 46%, making the race for the political middle highly competitive.

The independent vote shift is a huge one. Just look at the graph:

Just as many independent voters now seem to be flocking towards McCain, so are women voters – a politically toxic sign for Obama:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has gained huge support and now leads Democrat Barack Obama among white women voters since naming Sarah Palin as his running mate, according to a survey published on Tuesday.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll found that much of McCain’s surge in the polls since the Republican National Convention is attributable to the shift in support among white women.

The race for the White House is now a virtual tie, with Obama at 47 percent support of registered voters and McCain at 46 percent, the poll found.

Before the Democratic National Convention in late August, Obama held an 8 percentage point lead among white women voters, 50 percent to 42 percent, but after the Republican convention in early September, McCain was ahead by 12 points among white women, 53 percent to 41 percent, the poll found.

McCain surprised the electorate ahead of the Republican convention by naming Palin, the little-known Alaska governor, as his vice presidential running mate. She received high marks among supporters for her convention address, which included a scathing attack ridiculing Obama’s experience and record.

That’s another huge shift. It has been reported that Obama’s campaign hoped Clinton would help take on Palin but it’s clear that the New York Senator is not going to do it. The New York Times:

In her first campaign outing since the Democratic National Convention, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton urged audiences across central Florida on Monday to oppose the Republican presidential ticket — “no McCain, no Palin” — but otherwise avoided criticizing a new contender for female voters, Gov. Sarah Palin.

The absence of heavy fire directed at Ms. Palin had been expected, given a reluctance by Mrs. Clinton to turn her campaigning into a battle between two women. Yet advisers to Senator Barack Obama said Mrs. Clinton was nonetheless their best surrogate to counter the Republican ticket’s new drive to win over white working women and mothers who supported her in the Democratic primaries.

Ms. Palin has been explicitly courting those women, and national polls taken in the wake of last week’s Republican convention indicate that the McCain-Palin ticket is drawing interest and support from them.

This doesn’t bode well for the Obama campaign.

They have to pray for some kind of McCain campaign snafu, hope that the polls only reflect a passing independent-voter/women-voter consideration — or retool the campaign ASAP. Obama bigwigs have been (seemingly) confidently telling reporters that what matters is the ground came and they’re confident in swing states — but these polling numbers reflecting defecting women voters, a big chunk of independent voters moving towards McCain and Democratic disunity aren’t the ingredients that usually spell v-i-c-t-o-r-y.

And these polls? Each side pooh-poohs polls that don’t make it look good (usually the tactic is to talk about how the methodology is bad) and then touts the ones that make them look ahead (the methodology is terrific when it a campaign ahead).

But the bottom line is now this: in four of five national polls released over the past 24 hours McCain has pulled ahead of Obama. A bounce? Or a trend?