After a big push political weekend by both sides — 1.8 million doors knocked on for Obama, for instance — the final polls are coming fast and furious almost as rapidly as the last minute charges.
The bottom line: most national polls show Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama with a comfortable national lead now outside the margin of error, while some battleground state polls indicate rival Republican Sen. John McCain is making headway and narrowing the numbers. Here’s a quick rundown on the latest — which could be outdated by the you finish reading this:
*The final Ipsos/McClatchy Poll has Obama ahead by 8 percent:
Barack Obama leads John McCain nationally by 50-42 percent heading into the final hours of the 2008 presidential campaign, according to an Ipsos/McClatchy Poll released Monday.
The poll, taken through Sunday, found 1 percent of likely voters supporting independent candidate Ralph Nader and 7 percent still undecided.
When the undecided voters were pushed to choose a candidate based on their views on the issues, they split almost evenly, with a slight edge to McCain. With all likely voters allocated to candidates, Obama led 53-46 percent, with 1 percent still for Nader.
If Obama were able to match that Tuesday, it would mark the first time that a Democrat has topped 50 percent in a national election since Jimmy Carter won 50.1 percent of the popular vote in 1976.
The survey includes people who’ve already voted.
*FiveThirtyEight sees Obama gaining nationally while the races become closer in some key states:
Barack Obama’s position has become somewhat stronger since our update this afternoon. We now have him with a 5.8 point lead in the national popular vote, and winning the election 96.3 percent of the time. Earlier today, those figures were 5.4 and 93.7, respectively.
I continue to find a hair’s worth of tightening on balance in the state-by-state polls — even as Obama’s position in the national trackers seems to be roughly as strong as it has ever been. This, ironically, is the exact reverse of the position we saw earlier in the week, when the national polls seemed to be tightening even as the state polls weren’t.
However, Obama’s win percentage has ticked upward again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he’s gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania since our last update, with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before. (The Zogby poll is probably an outlier, but may serve to balance out outliers like Strategic Vision on the other side). Secondly, McCain’s clock has simply run out.
*A Fox News poll has Obama with a 7 point lead going into tomorrow’s election.
*A Quinnipiac University poll finds Obama with big leads in Ohio and Pennsylvania with Florida once again as the presidential election wildcard:
FLORIDA: Obama 47 – McCain 45; OHIO: Obama 50 – McCain 43; PENNSYLVANIA: Obama 52 – McCain 42 Democratic Sen. Barack Obama ends his historic bid for the White House with a seven-point lead over Republican Sen. John McCain among likely voters in Ohio and 10 points in Pennsylvania, but with just a two-point, too-close-to-call lead in Florida, according to simultaneous Quinnipiac University Swing State polls released today.
No one has been elected President since 1960 without taking two of these three largest swing states in the Electoral College.
*A Fox News/Rasmussen Report finds McCain making headway in battleground states but most likely not enough to get the big prize tomorrow:
FOX News/Rasmussen Reports battleground polling this week shows some improvements for John McCain but the overall results still leave Barack Obama in a better position on the eve of the election.
Obama now leads in two of the battleground states while the candidates are tied or within a point of each other in four. At one level, that’s an improvement for McCain. Last week, he was even in just two states while trailing in four.
But while it’s an improvement for the GOP candidate, this week’s results don’t alter the underlying dynamic of the race. All six of these battleground states were Republican states in 2004 and McCain probably needs to win all six to capture the White House.
Ohio is one of the two states where McCain gained ground this week and the candidates are now tied at 49% in the Buckeye State. This helps explain why the campaigns have had such a strong presence in the state during the closing days of election 2008.
In the last six FOX News/Rasmussen Reports Ohio polls, Obama and McCain have been within two points of each other five times. Neither man has reached the 50% level of support in any of the past six Ohio surveys.
McCain also gained ground in Florida this week. After trailing by four a week ago, the Republican hopeful now holds a one-point advantage, 50% to 49%. This is the second time in three weeks that McCain has been up by a point in Florida. A month ago, Obama was up by seven in the state.
There was little overall change in the other four battleground states this week.
This poll, as others, shows how much polls can vary and how news reports might seem not in sync with polls. Which means tomorrow the final vote will be more fascinating than usual…
Writes NBC’S Domenico Montanaro:
Obama has now led in 111 straight national polls with methodologies we trust (looking back through the Pollster.com national trend), including the trackers back to Sept. 22-24 when a Gallup Tracking poll showed the race tied at 46%-46%. Since a Big Ten poll that showed McCain up 46%-45%, Obama has led in 117 of 119 polls.
UPDATE: Nielsen reports a big Obama advantage in advertising in swing states:
During the final weekend preceding the presidential election, Sen. Barack Obama ran 77% more TV ads than Sen. John McCain (5,947 vs. 3,358) in seven key swing states: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Despite trailing Obama in terms of the total number of TV ad units placed, McCain showed a much larger percentage increase in TV advertising from the previous weekend (Friday October 24 thru Sunday, October 26) to this past weekend (Friday, October 31 thru Sunday, November 2).
McCain bumped his TV ad units up by 76% overall in the seven battleground states Nielsen tracked, while Obama increased his advertising in those states by just 3% over the previous weekend.
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.