President Obama got his best day of polling in a few days today, as we are beginning to see clear signs that Mitt Romney's post-debate bounce is fading in polls that don't include the immediate debate fallout and do include Sunday. There is a large discrepancy in polling today and a clear divide between the polls that have most of their data taken on Thursday/Friday (immediately after the debate) and the polls that have most of their data taken on Saturday/Sunday (immediately after the drop in the unemployment rate).
Here are the numbers, followed by my analysis.
Originally published at No We Can't Politics.
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* IOWA: Obama 49%, Romney 47% -- Obama +5% since 2 weeks ago (Rasmussen)
* COLORADO: Obama 49%, Romney 48% -- Obama +3% since 2 weeks ago (Rasmussen)
* VIRGINIA: Obama 50%, Romney 47% -- Romney +2% since 2 weeks ago (Public Policy)
* MICHIGAN: Obama 48%, Romney 45% -- Romney +7% since 1 month ago (EPIC-MRA)
* MICHIGAN: Obama 49%, Romney 46% -- Obama +1% since 1 month ago (Baydoun)
* PENNSYLVANIA: Obama 47%, Romney 45% -- No change since 2 weeks ago (Susquehanna)
In the national trackers, Obama expanded his lead from 3% to 5% in the Gallup daily tracker and Romney's 2% lead fell to a tie in the Rasmussen daily tracker. Pew Research had an attention-grabbing poll showing Romney up 4%.
After Romney saw very clear gains on Friday and Saturday, things leveled off a bit yesterday and now he lost ground in most polls released today. It's hard to say whether the reversal of Romney's bounce is due to a to-be-expected fading, or because of the unemployment rate drop on Friday -- the answer is probably a combination of the two, along with the pushback on some of Romney's position shifts during the debate.
It's pretty clear that polls that have the majority of their surveys taken during the immediate impact of last week's debate but before the unemployment rate drop came out, Thursday and Friday, show very strong results for Romney. We saw that in the Pew poll, the Susquehanna poll, and the EPIC-MRA poll, for example. But the polls that have dropped Thursday from their samples and have Saturday and Sunday, days after the jobs report, as the days making up the majority of their samples, show Romney's bounce dropping off. We saw that in the Rasmussen state polls and the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls, for example. And Public Policy also tweeted that their surveys from Saturday and after were more or less back to pre-debate levels.
We still need to see more polling data before making any conclusive statements, particularly more data from Saturday on, since those polls will account for the fallout to both the debate and the unemployment rate drop. But from the data we have over the last two days, Obama has regained some of what he lost in the immediate fallout from the debate (though Romney has likely gained some overall compared to where he was prior to the debate).
The Iowa and Colorado numbers from Rasmussen are particularly good for Obama, since Rasmussen was one of the few pollsters showing Romney leads in those two swing states before, but now he has Obama ahead. As I've been saying, Iowa is a vital state for Obama -- it, along with Ohio, Nevada, and New Hampshire -- are the best bets he has at forming some sort of electoral college firewall.
Originally published at No We Can't Politics.
