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A picture is worth a thousand words so here is the Gallup daily tracking poll through today: 
Often during the primary season the Gallup tracking poll and the Rasmussen poll were at odds. But not now. Here is the Rasmussen picture: 
The margin of error on Gallup and Rasmussen is +/-2 so Obama is ahead outside the margin. But, when you have two polls with differences in methodology and each shows Obama with 48 and one has McCain at 40 and the other 41, you can drop that margin of error even further. Kevin Drum is predicting a near permanent lead of this size for Obama. One can hope for that. It could also be a bounce from the June 3rd speech night where Obama did his thing and McCain did his lime-green thing. And Hillary Clinton's recent endorsement is obviously another likely factor. At any rate, this is a faster poll improvement than I expected and I'm an optimist. Contrarily, I've heard some pessimists say in comments that these national polls mean nothing and that Obama could finish with a 5-point lead over McCain and lose in the electoral college. While there are reasons to believe that Obama could get "Gore"d with an even higher popular vote margin than Al, there is virtually no way he'll lose in the electoral college with a 5% margin in the popular vote (Gore's margin was only 0.5%). While you can carefully construct a scenario where he loses each and every close state and wins California and New York with 75% of the vote, it won't happen that way. As we get closer to election day and there are more and more state polls to look at, we can turn our attention to those. For now, the national polls remain a useful yardstick on the state of the race.
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