Below The Beltway

It’s all over but the voting, and unless there is something seriously wrong with every poll out there, it looks like a lot of people will be voting for Barack Obama.

First, the Ramussen tracking poll has Barack Obama up by six points:

On Monday, the final full day of campaigning for Election 2008, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows Barack Obama with 52% of the vote while John McCain is six points back at 46%. That’s up a single point for Obama from his 51% to 46% advantage yesterday.

(…)

Unless McCain pulls off a stunning comeback, history will note the final two weeks of September as the decisive and defining moment of this campaign. On September 14, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll showed McCain up by three points. Then, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the Wall Street debacle began. McCain’s lead disappeared almost immediately. By September 26, Obama reached the 50% level of support and was ahead by five percentage points.

The Democratic nominee never let go of that lead. Today is the 39th straight day that Obama’s support has stayed between 50% and 52%. Only once during that entire time did his lead fall below four points and it occasionally expanded to eight (see trends).

And the mean reason that happens is because Barack Obama simply ran a better Presidential campaign than John McCain did.

The final Gallup poll, meanwhile, shows Barack Obama up by eleven points under the most conservative likely voter model:

PRINCETON, NJ — The final Gallup 2008 pre-election poll — based on Oct. 31-Nov. 2 Gallup Poll Daily tracking — shows Barack Obama with a 53% to 42% advantage over John McCain among likely voters. When undecided voters are allocated proportionately to the two candidates to better approximate the actual vote, the estimate becomes 55% for Obama to 44% for McCain.

The trend data clearly show Obama ending the campaign with an upward movement in support, with eight to 11 percentage point leads among likely voters in Gallup’s last four reports of data extending back to Oct. 28. Obama’s final leads among both registered voters and likely voters are the largest of the campaign.

(…)

Gallup’s final estimate is based on Gallup’s traditional likely voter model, and assumes an estimated turnout of 64% of the voting age population, an increase over 2004. (Gallup estimates voter turnout from the results of key voter turnout questions, using a model that compares how respondents’ answers to these questions have related, historically, to actual turnout.) This year’s higher turnout estimate is fueled by a surge in early voting — 28% of registered voters in the final poll indicated they had already voted — and higher turnout among blacks than in any of the last four presidential elections.

Gallup has been calculating and reporting an expanded likely voter model alongside its traditional model over the past month. In the end, the candidate selection estimates of the two models converged, and both show the same unallocated 53% to 42% margin for Obama.

The gap in voter support for Obama versus McCain is slightly wider (53% to 40%) when the vote preferences of all registered voters are taken into account.

The forecasts are basically the same from the remaining national polls.

In the Zogby poll, Obama is up by 7 points. In the Hotline poll, he’s up by 5. In the GWU/Battleground poll, Obama leads McCain by 6 points. Even the Investor’s Business Daily poll, which had been showing a tight race all last week, now has Obama up by five points. Obama also has substantial leads in the final polls from Marist, NBC News, Fox News, and CNN.

It’s really quite simple, either all these national polls, which are far more scientific than the polls that showed Reagan and Carter in a deadlock on the eve of what turned out to be a Republican landslide, are wrong or Barack Obama will probably win tomorrow.