Well lets see, Daily Tracking Polls...
Rasumussen has it John McCain 48% to Barack Obama 47%
Not any change from yesterday but still McCain seems to have topped out at 50-47 several days ago. Obama's top number has been as high as 51% as recently as 9/2. That just can't be something that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis likes.
Gallup now has Barack Obama leading John McCain 47%-45%. In this poll McCain has been sliding since Sept 9 when he still had a 48%-43% lead. I don't think this bodes well for his campaign. They've led the discussion for the last two and a half weeks. Only in the last few days has the economy presented itself as the story. Granted 2/3 of this poll was conducted after the weekend of Lehman Brothers collapse and Merrill Lynch's sale. That just indicates that McCain is taking the heat (justifiably) on this and that you didn't build up enough good will to whether the coming storm.
In the electoral prediction arena, Electoral-vote.com has McCain with 257 votes(270 needed to win), Obama with 247 and 34 votes too close to call (tied).Virginia and Pennsylvania are the tied states. I still think Mark Warner will provide a reverse coattails effect for Obama in Virginia. Pennsylvania may be a tossup until the very end.
Michigan, Minnesota and Washington have become closer in the last week and states such as Missouri, Nevada and New Mexico have moved into McCain's column.
Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has the projection at 288 for McCain to 250 for Obama. Before you panic too much, with his formula for calculating such things, McCain Palin/convention bump has only come to full effect in the last few days. Any backing off will, conversely, take a while to be seen in the results as well. Short version is, it is almost the same as Electoral-Vote but with the ties going to McCain. Granted, he has Pennsylvania and New Mexico for Obama and Virginia, Colorado and Nevada for McCain. There are plenty of states, including those, in play, he just doesn't call any as 'ties' or 'too close to call'. It's either one way or the other. So there will be plenty of variation as we move forward on this, especially if the 'Palin bubble' really has burst.
ElectionProjection.com is another one that does not like to use the 'tie' or 'too close to call' option. The have Obama up 273 to 265. I am not as sure of their methodology. I am not a real big fan of using national poll numbers in any way when figuring out how a state may vote. But who knows, I didn't take a whole lot of courses in statistics in college, he might wind up the most accurate of them all.
Conclusion, thus far, it appears that McCain has, at best leveled off, and may indeed be slipping slowly toward pre-convention numbers. How much of that is people with Sarah Palin hangovers, or the voters starting to get exactly how much the McCain campaign has altered the truth (OK, lied) in the last week, is hard to know. Later this week, or early next week should give more insight into that.
Still, the Democrats do not need to panic, yet. McCain should have gotten a much bigger bounce with the Palin/convention combo than he did. That he didn't is probably making Rick Davis have some white knuckles. The Wall Street mess should make those knuckles even whiter in the coming weeks.
Comments welcome,
Pat McGovern Sphere: Related Content
