Today's Daily Kos Research 2000 tracking poll has Obama leading McCain 51-45. 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: 51 (50) 45 (45) 3 LV
Reuters/Zogby: 50 (50) 43 (43) 2.9 LV
Rasmussen: 51 (51) 47 (46) 2 LV
Diageo/Hotline: 48 (48) 41 (42) 3.4 LV
Battleground: 49 (49) 45 (46) 3.1 LV
Gallup: 52 (50) 41 (42) 2 RV LV II is 52 (51) - 43 (44).
IBD/TIPP: 48 (48) 44 (44) 3.3 LV alternate link
ABC/WaPo: 53 (52) 44 (44) 3 LV
Marist: 50 (49) 43 (44) 4.5 LV
Yesterday
CBS/NY Times: 52 (52) 41 (39) 3 LV
Fox: 47 (49) 44 (40) 3 LV Major shift in D-R
On successive individual days in the R2K poll (different than the topline, which is a combined three day sample), Obama was up +5 Tues, +5 Wed and +8 Thurs, with a +6 Mon sample rolling off (rounding can take place.) These are starting to look like stable numbers. The Obama video (33.6 million viewers) will start to be reflected today, but not completely until Sunday. The last R2K poll of the election will be published Monday.
Here is the pollster.com high sensitivity tracker graph:
Here are the R2K internals on party and independents:
From CBS/NY Times:
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.
In a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said that they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people to serve in his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.
and
The survey found that opinions of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have hardened considerably, as 9 in 10 voters who said that they had settled on a candidate indicated that their minds were made up; a growing number of them called it "extremely important" that their candidate win the election on Tuesday.
About half of each of the candidate’s supporters said that they were "scared" of what the other candidate would do if elected. Just 4 percent of voters were undecided, and when they were pressed to say whom they were leaning toward, the shape of the race remained essentially the same.
and
Mr. McCain’s renewed efforts to recast himself as the candidate of change — he and Ms. Palin sometimes refer to themselves as "a couple of mavericks" — have apparently faltered. Sixty-four percent of voters polled said that Mr. Obama would bring about real change if elected, while only 39 percent said that Mr. McCain would. And despite Mr. McCain’s increased efforts to distance himself from President Bush, a majority still said that he would generally continue President Bush’s policies.
Not good for Palin-McCain.
Also, a new Diageo/Hotline poll shows Latino support in the west going to Obama (MoE +/- 3.5):
HISPANIC VOTERS IN SOUTHWESTERN BATTLEGROUND STATES FAVOR OBAMA OVER MCCAIN, 67% - 24%
A Diageo/Hotline poll conducted among 800 Hispanic voters in Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, finds that Barack Obama leads John McCain among Hispanic voters in the race for the Presidency by a 43-point margin, with 6% of voters saying they are undecided.
Worse:
Amy Walter, Editor-in-Chief of the Hotline commented: "That McCain is unfavorably viewed by an overwhelming majority of Hispanics in the Southwest is bad news for his election chances in this fast growing part of the country. But the worst part for the GOP is that the party as a whole is seen unfavorably by these voters."
This is Obama's firewall, and these numbers show you why. Those are 19 EVs that used to belong to the GOP.
More on the undecideds from Mark Blumenthal:
[Charles] Franklin's finding? The model predicts that the totally undecided voters in this sample will split 54 percent for Obama and 46 percent for McCain (more details on Franklin's model here).
Of course, this result is far from the final word on this subject. The pollsters at Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, Research2000, Rasmussen Reports and three other organizations have been collecting similarly large pools of data that should enable comparable analyses. Hopefully, we will hear more from all of them soon.
Finally, here's a nice profile of Nate and Sean (of fivethirtyeight.com) at Poynter.
Added because I love it: