Today's Daily Kos Research 2000 tracking poll has Obama leading McCain 50-43. All trackers are data from three days to five days prior to posting, with the R2K numbers from today (yesterday's numbers in parentheses) and the other trackers from yesterday (previous day's data). Data is updated as new information becomes available. Daily posting is approximately 7:30 am EDT. LV=likely voter, RV=registered voter.
Nate Silver (fivethirtyeight.com) wrote up a tracking poll primer covering the eight available trackers. It includes sample size, time of publication and quirks, as well as Nate's opinion of the trackers. Recommended.
Obama McCain MoE +/- RV/LV
Today
Research 2000: 50 (50) 43 (42) 3 LV
Reuters/Zogby: 49 (50) 45 (45) 2.9 LV
Rasmussen: 51 (51) 46 (46) 2 LV
Diageo/Hotline: 50 (50) 42 (42) 3.4 LV
Battleground: 49 (49) 46 (46) 3.1 LV
Gallup: 50 (52) 43 (42) 2 RV See also the LV I and LV II numbers
IBD/TIPP: 48 (47) 44 (44) 3.3 LV alternate link
ABC/WaPo: 52 (52) 45 (45) 3 LV
Pew: 53 (53) 39 (38) 3.5 LV
On successive individual days in the R2K poll (different than the topline, which is a combined three day sample), Obama was up +9 Sat, +5 Sunday and +6 Mon, with a +11 Friday sample rolling off.
Here is the tracker-only, high-sensitivity pollster.com graph. What's clear is that tightening is more McCain creeping up than Obama dropping. However, it is not enough to change the election trajectory, as yet another day falls off the calendar, and McCain-Palin pre-post-mortems continue to be written in public.
From pollster Steve Lombardo:
The LCG regression analysis shows McCain behind by 7.6 points. If the current trend holds, McCain will lose the election by 8.7 points. To give you an idea of the hole McCain finds himself in, we have not seen a single reputable national poll showing McCain at or above 50% in more than a month.
The markets agree. This morning, IEM is Obama 86.8-13.0 and Intrade is Obama 87.8-12.2. (See Bettors give McCain bid long odds).
More evidence Republicans are coming home (same as in the last R2K' tightening'):
We've noted that McCain is doing well in the South and Obama elsewhere. From the ABC/WaPo poll:
Obama is outperforming any Democrat back to Jimmy Carter among white voters, getting 45 percent to McCain's 52 percent. But in the South, it is a very different story. Obama fares worse among Southern whites than any Democrat since George McGovern in 1972.
Whites in the East and West tilt narrowly toward Obama (he's up 8 and 7 points, respectively), and the two run about evenly among those in the Midwest. By contrast, Southern whites break more than 2 to 1 for McCain, 65 percent to 32 percent.
That stark divide is not simply a partisan difference. While white Democrats outside the South give Obama margins of 80 points or more, he leads by a more modest 65 points among white Southern Democrats. The Democrat is up 55 points among liberal whites in the region, far under his performance among those voters elsewhere, where he is up by 79 points.
From R2K (note the McCain bump the last two weekends when the R2K poll modestly tightened, which I attributed to Republicans coming home):
Added:
I checked a bit into the idea that weekend polls aid one side or the other... there's a paucity of data. I did come across this piece on the old Mystery Pollster site, the predecessor of pollster.com (scroll to #2):
There's more...
Next, 1/2 of the polling nights are considered weekend nights, and weekend polling is notoriously unreliable and favorable to Democrats.
MP [Mystery Pollster Mark Blumenthal] has his own doubts about the reliability of weekend interviewing but was surprised to see evidence presented by the ABC pollsters at the recent AAPOR conference showing no systematic bias in partisanship for weekend interviews. The ABC pollsters looked at their pre-election tracking surveys conducted between October 1 and November 1 of 2004, and compared 14,000 interviews conducted on weeknights (Sunday to Thursday) with 6,597 conducted on Fridays and Saturdays. Party ID was 33% Dem, 30% GOP on weeknights, 32% Dem 30% GOP on weekends, a non-significant difference even with the massive sample size.
For the most part, a good poll is likely to be right, weekend or weekday.