We won’t see any impact in the tracking polls from last night’s debate for a few days, so these should be taken as a baseline in any discussion of what impact the debate actually had on the race.
First, Rasmussen finds a slight tightening, but Obama remains in a comfortable lead:
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows Barack Obama attracting 51% of the vote while John McCain earns 45%. For the past thirteen days, Obama’s support has ranged from 50% to 52% while McCain has been at 44% of 45% every day (see trends). Results are based upon nightly telephone interviews and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. The overwhelming majority of interviews for this morning’s update were conducted before the conclusion of last night’s Presidential debate.
Obama is viewed favorably by 56% of voters, McCain by 52%
Meanwhile, the Gallup Daily tracking poll shows signs of what may be a real game-changer in Obama’s favor:
PRINCETON, NJ — The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking report shows Barack Obama with a 52% to 41% lead over John McCain.
These results, based on Oct. 5-7 polling, are the best for Obama during the campaign, both in terms of his share of the vote and the size of his lead over McCain. (To view the complete trend since March 7, 2008, click here.)
Nearly all interviews in today’s report were conducted before Tuesday night’s town hall style debate in Nashville. Any movement in voter preferences as a result of this debate will be apparent in coming days.
Voter preferences seem to have stabilized for the moment, as Obama has held a double-digit lead over McCain in each of the last three individual nights of polling.
Concern about the economy seems to be playing to Obama’s advantage; he overtook McCain when the financial crisis worsened in the middle of September, and his strong showing today coincides with the worst rating of the economy this year
Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two other tracking polls that show the race as being much tighter than Rasmussen and Gallup currently do. The Zogby/Reuters/C-Span tracking poll has Obama with a slim two point lead among likely voters, while the Hotline tracking poll shows a one-point lead. At the moment, these two polls seem to be outliers merely because Rasmussen and Gallup are more in line with the other national polls which show Obama with a lead of between 3-7 percentage points.
Starting tomorrow, we’ll start to see if last night’s debate had any impact on the race at all.
