I'll break my usual rule on not blogging about national polling numbers as the following qualifies as a landmark of sorts. In recent days, we have picked up significant movement toward the Democrats in our state-by-state polling numbers. Now, according to a fresh CBS/NYT poll, both Democrats now lead John McCain by double digits. Hillary Clinton's lead is 12 points, while Barack Obama's lead is 11.
This represents the largest lead ever for Hillary Clinton in a national poll against John McCain, and the largest lead for Obama since before the Ohio and Texas primaries.
Obama has also improved his margin against Hillary Clinton among likely Democratic primary voters to 12 points.
Caveat: CBS/NYT has a distinctly poor track record.
UPDATE: And here's something very, very interesting. By a 49-45 plurality, respondents said that suspending the gas tax for the summer is a bad idea. Democrats oppose the idea 50-47, while independents oppose it by an enormous 60-32 margin. However, Republicans favor suspending the gas tax 58-37.
I've criticized the Obama campaign for being too risk-averse in recent weeks, but I thought it required a lot of testicular fortitude on their part to try and turn around the gas tax issue and play offense with it. If Obama beats expectations on Tuesday -- and I think its safe to assume that Edison-Mitofsky will be including questions about the gas tax in their exit interviews -- the people on their messaging and internal polling teams are going to have really earned their paychecks.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
CBS/NYT: Both Dems lead McCain by double digits
-- Nate Silver at 5:19 PM
Labels: national polls
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9 comments
Those gas-tax numbers are interesting. I wonder what the degree of agreement/disagreement is. I imagine that those that have reached the conclusion that it is bad, realize HOW bad it is and see it as political posturing. Whereas many of those might agree with it, may see it as a rather trivial issue and not that important overall.
Caveat indeed. There is no other national poll even approaching those numbers. The two tracking polls have McCain at +3 and +5. Even with the CBS poll Obama ia only +1.1 in the RCP average.
I wouldn't get too caught up in their lousy polling.
Just because the poll does not have a distinctly strong record does not suggest that we can interpret their numbers cautiously and draw out conclusions. Certainly we can say a number of things without worrying about its record. We can conclude that the poll suggests that the gas tax ploy by the Clinton Campaign is not necessarily being embraced, which is a significant finding. And furthermore, there might be a conceivable move back to Obama that we might see in other polls this week. This suggests that Obama's depressed numbers have now gone up after he addresses the concerns. Overall, if this is true, we can express more confidence in him, perhaps even suggesting that he is more like Reagan--a politician who has numbers that go down, but when Americans go back to hear or see him again, the numbers often go back up. That recognition (if true, and this upcoming week will be important in this regard, particularly the Gallup Tracking), should make superdelegates confident enough to move to Obama on May 20th (if Obama wins Oregon as Poblano suggests).
Thanks
Hassan
Hassan
I don't get how does these results square with the recent poll results from New Hampshire? Obama up over McCain by 12 nationally and down by 6 to 10 in NH?
And shouldn't he also be picking up steam in NC and IN against Clinton if he is doing better nationally? I haven't see that in any head-to-head polling in the last two days.
Nope, the obvious truth is that CBS/NYT didn't like the result of their poll done just FOUR DAYS EARLIER so they commissioned another poll and asked the poll-takers for better results for their candidate of choice.
I just noticed this, but thank you for getting rid of the squares on the win percentage tracker, they were hard to look at.
can someone explain in layman terms what the swing state analysis is?
i understand that the higher the state the more 'swing' it is and i guess more likely to tilt the election...
but can someone expound on that?
thanks!
From the FAQ:
What is the 'Swing State Analysis'? Essentially, it's the percentage of the time that the state proves to pivotal in determining the outcome of the election. There is exactly one 'swing state' assigned for each of the 10,000 simulations. The Swing State Analysis may serve as a good proxy for resource allocation by the candidates. See discussion here.
Hey, Internet Explorer does not open the site. Firefox does without problems.
Some pollster (either USA Today/Gallup or CBS/NY Times) is horribly wrong in their results here. Over the exact same time period, (5/1-5/3), the US/Gallup comes up with Clinton +7, while the CBS/NYT comes up with Obama +12. A 19 point divergence?!
An examination of each polls internals is in order. RCP reports the USA/Gallup poll with 516 Likely Voters, to 283 LV for the CBS/NYT, so at the very least the USA poll has more respondants.
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