CBS/NY Times
LV, 10/27-9 (10/19-22), MoE +/- 3
Obama 52 (52)
McCain 41 (39)
Obama beats McCain on the economy 52-31. And 55% of working class voters think John McCain will raise their taxes.
CBS:
A small percentage of these voters could still switch sides: The figures include both firm supporters of each candidate and those who lean towards one or the other but have not fully committed. These so-called leaners, however, make up less than 10 percent of each candidate's support, a sign that significant movement in the campaign's final days is not likely. Just five percent of the likely voters surveyed remain completely undecided.
Seventeen percent of registered voters say they have already voted, either by absentee ballot or at early voting sites, and this group favors Obama by a large margin. The 13 percent of registered voters casting ballots for the first time favor Obama over McCain by two-to-one.
Added from NY Times:
A growing number of voters have concluded that Senator John McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, is not qualified to be vice president, weighing down the Republican ticket in the last days of the campaign, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said that Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up 9 percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said that the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favored Senator Barack Obama.
From the NY Times:
While most Democrats described the tone of Mr. Obama’s advertising as positive and Mr. McCain’s as negative, Republicans were more likely to say both campaigns were negative. The plurality of the Republican voters surveyed, 45 percent, said the ads on behalf of Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama. At the same time, 48 percent of Republican voters said Mr. Obama’s ads attacked Mr. McCain.
And almost half of independent voters, 48 percent, described the tone of the commercials broadcast for Mr. Obama as positive, while 64 percent said Mr. McCain’s were negative.
Traditionally, the optimistic guy wins.
Here's a reason to cover all the polls. While these are good numbers for Obama, the media network polls – specifically CBS/NY Times (now +11, 10/27-9), NBC/WSJ (+10, 10/17-20), and Newsweek (+12, 10/22-23), along with Pew (+15, 10/23-26) – have been very favorable to Obama. Here's a pollster.com graph of those 4 polls:
The tracking polls have been much tighter with today's (yesterday's) numbers, followed by the graph.
Obama McCain MoE +/- RV/LV
Today
Research 2000: 50 (50) 45 (44) 3 LV
Reuters/Zogby: 50 (49) 43 (44) 2.9 LV
Rasmussen: 51 (50) 46 (47) 2 LV
Diageo/Hotline: 48 (49) 42 (42) 3.4 LV
Battleground: 49 (49) 46 (46) 3.1 LV Still.
Gallup: 50 (51) 42 (42) 2 RV LV II is 51 (51) - 44 (44).
IBD/TIPP: 48 (47) 44 (44) 3.3 LV alternate link
ABC/WaPo: 52 (52) 44 (44) 3 LV
From Andrew Romano, Newsweek:
There's no need, for example, to obsess over the national numbers. First, the national movement--one or two percentage points on the margin--is "well within the usual range of sampling noise," according to Pollster's Mark Blumenthal. In other words, the decline in Obama's lead isn't large enough (at this point) to qualify as statistically significant.
Second, much of the shift is attributable to a slight rise in McCain's level of support (from about 42.5 percent to about 44 percent); Obama's support, meanwhile, has hovered steadily around 50 percent or so.
Where have you heard that before? Hmmm, let me think.
As to what's real, we're looking more to the trackers, but there's always the chance that the truth lies somewhere in between, and that the models that drive IBD/TIPP, Zogby and Battleground are driving the tracking averages down a bit. For example, Nate Silver picks up on a Carl Bialik WSJ column (I don't link to Carl enough, his Numbers Guy column is uniformly excellent) that suggests the IBD/TIPP poll is just plain wrong.
According to most polls, Sen. Barack Obama holds a formidable lead over Sen. John McCain among the youngest voters. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, Obama leads by 32 points in the latest Gallup poll, by 36 points in the latest CBS/New York Times poll and by 39 points in the latest Pew poll [and 29 in the latest R2K - DemFromCT]. However, one daily tracking poll consistently has shown McCain leading Obama among a similar group, 18- to 24-year-olds — an anomaly that provides a lesson about the dangers of slicing polling data too thin, especially among voters who are hard to reach.
OTOH, if you only get your news from those big media polls, you might get the impression the race was over. Funny thing is, that'd be just about right. There's no national poll that McCain leads in. Stu Rothenberg asked Chuck Todd today (MSNBC) why he made it sound like there was still a race.
Without being complacent, it's tough to see, with another day off the calendar, how McCain wins. That is, unless you believe fervently in the Bradley effect (I don't) or that this is 2004 (it isn't.) If you believe both, your name might be Bill McInturff, McCain's pollster, who has a vested interest in spinning a close race.
Also, McInturff believes something we've argued for some time: Obama's poll number will be his number in a given state; undecided voters will break for McCain. And it is this final point that does have McCain folks not throwing in the towel yet. While there might not be such a thing as the "Bradley Effect," there could be a "Wilder Effect." In Doug Wilder's race, he was at 50% in the final polls and that's basically what he got on Election Day. It was enough for victory, but undecideds dramatically moved against him.
As for the undecideds (see also this am's post) here's more:
Stan Greenberg:
The [McInturff] memo says that the "undecided" and "refused" voters "will break decisively in our direction, adding a "net three plus points to our margin." That is pretty amazing. Using the combined database, we looked at the "undecided," "refused" and the undecided "leaning" to a candidate - 7 percent of the electorate. Using their stated leanings to the candidates and feelings toward the parties, this undecided vote broke near evenly between Obama and McCain. In our latest presidential battleground poll, they broke near evenly as well. To get a 3-point net gain, the undecided would have to break 5 to 2 for McCain. There is no evidence to indicate such an impending break against Obama. Instead, the undecided could push Obama’s vote up at least another point.
From Andy Kohut (Pew, via Newsweek):
Kohut's conclusion, as reported this morning on the Politico, was almost identical: "undecided voters [are] likely to split about equally between McCain and Obama." Which means that if Kohut and Franklin are correct Obama will beat McCain 52 percent to 46 percent on Nov.4--unless McCain can begin to pry some support away from his opponent. As Kohut put it, "there is likely no hidden life raft in the undecided vote for John McCain."
As of now, that's where we stand. Since 33.6 million people watched the Obama ad, we will be interested in following how that affects the polls. The trackers will start picking that up tomorrow.