The see-saw continues: Democratic Party presumptive Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama has retaken a slim three percentage point lead over the GOP’s expected Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain in the latest Gallup Daily Tracking Poll:
Registered voters show a slight preference for Barack Obama (46%) over John McCain (43%) if the presidential election were held today, according to the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking results.
The three percentage point advantage for Obama matches the average since early June, when Obama clinched the number of delegates needed to head to the Democratic convention as the presumptive presidential nominee. Since then, Obama has never trailed McCain among registered voters, though McCain has tied Obama five times during this span, including Gallup Poll Daily tracking reports for last Friday and Saturday.
See our earlier post which notes that Obama started to sag in several key polls last week after McCain’s campaign went negative and put Obama on the defensive for a week. Obama’s numbers have now slightly edged up as the furor(s) died down. So the lesson for the McCain camp will likely be: keep cloning what worked. Are the Democrats ready to not just respond but try and control the campaign media narrative?
Meanwhile, the Real Clear Politics average of polls shows Obama a statistically-neglible 2.7 percent ahead. And the Pollster.com graph of polls shows McCain on the rise.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.