10/11 Daily Kos R2K Tracking Poll: Obama 52, McCain 40

Today's Daily Kos Research 2000 tracking poll has Obama up over McCain 52-40. All trackers are data from three 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). LV=likely voter, RV=registered voter.

                 Obama      McCain    MoE +/-   RV/LV
Today
Research 2000:  52 (52)    40 (40)    3         LV
Reuters/Zogby:  48 (48)    44 (43)    2.8       LV
Rasmussen:      52 (50)    45 (45)    2         LV
Diageo/Hotline: 50 (48)    40 (41)    3.2       LV
Gallup:         51 (51)    42 (41)    2         RV

Yesterday
Battleground:   51 (48)    43 (45)    3.5       LV [note several iterations released]

Newsweek:       52 (46)    41 (46)    3.7       RV
Fox:            46 (45)    39 (39)    3         RV

On successive days in the R2K poll, Obama was up +12 Wed, +14 Thurs and +12 Fri. Wednesday-Friday's sample represent entirely post-debate polling. Obama's percentage has been at or above 50 since 9/29.

Sarah Palin's fav/unfav is now - 20, 36-56.

IEM is at a remarkable 82.5-17 (guess who leads)? It's 78.4-22.6 at Intrade.

From Newsweek:

Obama appears to have broadened his coalition of support and made inroads with groups that have not reliably embraced him over the course of the long presidential campaign. He now leads McCain among both men (54 percent to 40 percent) and women (50 percent to 41 percent). He now wins every age group of voters—including those over 65 years of age, who back him over McCain 49 to 43 percent. Supporters of Hillary Clinton, as many as a fifth of whom had at one point told pollsters they'd support McCain over Obama, now back the Democratic nominee 88 percent to 7 percent.

From Fox:

Obama has also improved his standing with his party faithful. A month ago, 79 percent of Democrats were backing Obama. Today it is 86 percent. McCain has consistently received the backing of over 80 percent of Republicans and is backed by 83 percent today.

Independents split their vote 34 percent Obama and 32 percent McCain, with 24 percent unsure. That's little changed from two weeks ago when Obama was up by 36 percent to 31 percent and 29 percent undecided.

A 61 percent majority of voters believes Obama is going to win the election - more than three times as many as believe McCain will (18 percent). A month ago it was evenly divided: 41 percent Obama and 40 percent McCain (Sept. 8-9). This summer, voters were more likely to say Obama would win: 51 percent Obama and 27 percent McCain (July 22-23).

There are now more Republicans unhappy with McCain/Palin than Democrats unhappy with Obama /Biden (also seen in the R2K poll.)

There's nothing good in here if you are a Republican or a McCain supporter. Just saying. But if you want to grasp at straws, there's always Zogby. Jerome Armstrong reports:

Zogby, weights party ID by 38% Democratic, 36% Republican and 26% Independent. Age by 18% 18-29, 15% 30-49, 24% 50-64, and 17% 65+. And 75% White, 11% Black, 10% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 2% Other. All quite solid.

True, except for the potential underestimation of the youth vote, the AA vote and the Latino vote as well as the D-R split. From a Mark Blumenthal column:

For example, Silver found that the percentage of 18-to-34-year-olds on the Battleground poll (17 percent) was much smaller than on the CPS survey of voters from 2004 (24 percent*). He considered it "highly unlikely" that the Battleground pollsters were "deliberately" weighting down younger voters. "Instead," he concluded, "very probably they simply aren't weighting by age groups at all.

From Del Ali, the R2K pollster (in response to a previous question):

We weight regions on several factors, first and  foremost, is voter registration by county and the second  is electoral vote distribution

   I would strongly suggest to ignore 2004 and  previous models and outcomes. There is a significant number of new voters in  the process, more early and a significant number of more Black voters and  voters between the ages  18-29.

In reality, we (none of us) know what those numbers will look like in the exit polling, but I suspect Zogby's polling the last election, not this one.