9/29 Daily Kos R2K Tracking Poll: Obama 51, McCain 42

Today's Daily Kos Research 2000 tracking poll has Obama up over McCain 51-42. All trackers are data from three days prior to posting, with R2K numbers from today (yesterday's numbers in parentheses) and the other trackers are from yesterday (previous day's data). LV=likely voter, RV=registered voter.

Today's trackers will have Sat and Sun post-debate data, but will not fully reflect post-debate sentiment until Tuesday. The trackers do, however, include McCain campaign suspension/resumption days.

                 Obama      McCain    MoE +/-   RV/LV
Today
Research 2000:  51 (50)    42 (43)    3         LV

Yesterday
Rasmussen:      50 (50)    44 (44)    2         LV
Diageo/Hotline: 47 (48)    42 (43)    3.2       RV  
Gallup:         50 (49)    42 (44)    2         RV

Times/Bloomberg 49 (48)    44 (45)    4         RV  (previous data 1 week ago)

On successive days, Obama was up +7 Fri, +9 Sat and +11 Sun (MoE +/- 5.1 for individual days.) That +11 yesterday (single day polling) was Obama's strongest single day of polling, and is reflective of the debate Friday.

Other internals of note: Sarah Palin's fav/unfav are now – 9. 60+ voters are now only +5 McCain (down from +15 two weeks ago.) Obama now attracts more Dems (88) than McCain attracts Republicans (86), and Obama wins indies 49-41. McCain cannot win with those numbers.

Three of five polls have Obama up by 50% (or, if you prefer, Obama is in the 47-51% range and McCain can't break 45%.) The empirical suggestion is that McCain's "suspension" stunt failed to convince voters of its merits (click link for timeline).

Pundits give way too much credence to the idea that the aggressor in a debate wins. Partisans like aggression, but that is not what independent voters are looking for this year. They want Josiah Bartlett, not Col. Nathan Jessup. In addition to the "Obama won the insta-polls" idea (see Mark Blumenthal for Debate Reaction: What's a Win?), the LA Times/Bloomberg, Gallup and R2K improvements suggest Obama did himself some good; for those who need to see the numbers, they are there for Obama and not McCain.

LA Times/Bloomberg:

Obama was seen as more "presidential" by 46% of the debate watchers, compared with 33% for McCain.

The difference is even more pronounced among debate watchers who were not firmly committed to a candidate: 44% said they believed Obama looked more presidential, whereas 16% gave McCain the advantage.

The bottom line from Gallup:

But among the crucial group of independents who watched the debate -- those most likely to actually be swayed by what transpired, Obama won by 10 points, 43% to 33%.

If there's one reason Obama did well, it is, as multiple pundits have noted, the primacy of the economy. From Gallup:

I believe the data reflects not just the debate but McCain's antics in the days preceding the debate, which were economy-centric. And while it's an indirect measure of "reach comfort threshold", Obama's performance did him more good than the already well-known McCain:

Most people's minds were already made up going in, which makes it harder for McCain to catch up. And if you click the Gallup link above, you'll see that despite the right-leaning pundits' claims, Obama held McCain to a draw on foreign policy.

As Nate Silver notes,

Here's the long and short of it for John McCain: Barack Obama has as large a lead in the election as he's held all year. But there is much less time left on the clock than there was during other Obama periods of strength, such as in February, mid-June or immediately following the Democratic convention. This is a very difficult combination of circumstances for him.

To illustrate that, as well as to demonstrate that this is neither 2000 nor 2004, Charles Franklin from pollster.com was kind enough to update this chart for me, demonstrating the Dem candidate lead this year compared to those prior years:

One more polling note: Sam Wang has a piece here on the vanishing Bradley effect.

A hot topic among polling nerds is the "Bradley effect," which occurs when a non-white (usually black) candidate falls short of opinion polls on Election Day when he/she runs against a white candidate. For this reason it has been suggested that support for Obama might be overstated - a hidden bonus for John McCain. Now comes a large-scale empirical study (in preprint form) by Harvard political scientist Dan Hopkins. He finds that since the mid-1990s, the Bradley effect has disappeared. His paper is a must-read.

Overall, these are positive data for Obama going into Thursday's VP debate in St. Louis.