Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama now leads rival GOP Sen. John McCain by 7 percentage points in two key tracking polls.
Here’s the latest Gallup Daily Tracking poll — which doesn’t include the impact of last night’s Vice Presidential debate between Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Republican Gov. Sarah Palin:
Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Sept. 30-Oct. 2 has Barack Obama leading John McCain by seven percentage points, 49% to 42%.
Obama has held a statistically significant lead over McCain for each of the past seven days, ranging from four to eight points. (To view the complete trend since March 7, 2008, click here.)
Most of the interviewing in today’s three-day rolling average was conducted before Thursday night’s vice presidential debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin. Saturday’s tracking results will begin to show any impact the heavily watched face-off may have had on voter preferences for president.
Most snap polls taken after that debate indicate that Biden was considered to have been the winner. Meanwhile, Gallup warns that McCain could face further erosion due to increasingly-bad economic news:
Voters’ mindsets about the election in the coming days could also be influenced by the new Labor Department report out today, showing a bigger job loss in September than many analysts had predicted.
The pattern of voter preferences in September — with McCain’s post-Republican convention lead slipping away after the extraordinary Wall Street failures that began in mid-September, and Obama’s lead expanding to as much as eight points — suggests that Obama has benefited from Americans’ intensified economic anxiety during this period. Obama’s advantage on this issue was evident in Gallup’s post-presidential debate polling on Sept. 27, when the poll found Obama receiving much better scores from debate watchers for his performance on the economy than McCain.
The troubling new jobs report will most likely only reinforce, if not deepen, Americans’ economic concern in the coming days.
Even with a perfect campaign, McCain would be swimming upstream. And his campaign — most notably recently for some political toe-stubbing and a growing reportage narrative about him being an angry warrior — has been less than perfect. Next week is another Obama-McCain debate. Look for the McCain campaign to try to do something to shake the existing situation up.
Rasmussen finds the same spread:
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday again shows Barack Obama attracting 51% of the vote while John McCain earns 44%. For each of the past eight days, Obama has been at 50% or 51% and McCain has been at 44% or 45% . New polling shows Obama pulling away in New Hampshire and opening a growing lead in the Electoral College projections.
And here is a truly shocking figure:
Nationally, the number of voters who believe the country is heading in the right direction has fallen to 10%. That’s down dramatically from the already low level of 24% just before Lehman Brothers collapsed and started the recent Wall Street debacle. Eighty-six percent (86%) now say that the nation has gotten off on the wrong track.
Obama is viewed favorably by 57% of voters, McCain by 52% (see trends). Forty-five percent (45%) believe taxes will go up if Obama is elected while 24% say the same about a McCain victory.
Will McCain try yet another Hail Mary? Or has Mary left the building, too?
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.