|
Some narrowing of Barack Obama's lead in the tracking poll average today will no doubt spur numerous theories to explain it. "We expected it to narrow towards election day" or "It's a McCain debate bounce" or "Joe the plumber something" or "the smears are working." Take a look at the graph of the five tracking poll average (does not include the non-daily Battleground or IBD/TIPP which is less than a week old): 
Here's my take. The overriding picture is still stability. Obama has been between 49.2 and 50.5 for 12 days now and John McCain between 42.1 and 43.3. In fact, Obama's typical mark in this average has been 49.8 and he's been within 3 tenths of that point for all but a couple of days. Today we are right back to where we started with this 5-tracker on Oct. 7: a lead of about 6. Remember that the daily reports actually reflect the preceding three days' polling. So the data shown here for Oct. 7 was mostly collected before the market meltdown that started Oct. 6. I believe the stock market collapse of the Oct. 6-10 week created a bounce which has now faded away. It wasn't so much an Obama bounce (although a little, see his numbers on Oct. 11 and 12) as it was a McCain anti-bounce. His numbers fell sharply on the Oct. 9 report (fully reflecting three days of market fear) and stayed down for four more days until starting on Oct. 14 to gradually recover. There were other events, debates and such, but my take is that the market collapse of Oct. 6-10 hurt McCain and Republicans in general. The market, while still volatile, was better this past week and McCain's numbers have crept back up to where they were 12 days prior. So I don't expect much more narrowing although Chris Bowers' forecast of a stable 4-5 point Obama lead is reasonable. Your take? Update: It appears the TIPP tracking poll, which debuted Oct. 13, will be polling and publishing on weekends. If so, I will be adding to this average. Here's a preview: when you look at Oct. 13 thru Oct. 18 with TIPP in the average, there has been almost no movement, a steady Obama lead of about 6.5 points.
|
STATE BLOGS
