There’s been a flood of new polls recently, varying in significance. There’s a new version of the perennial question of which candidate one would prefer to have a beer with. An Associated Press-Yahoo News poll asked voters who they would prefer to watch a football game with. Obama won 50% to 47%. Some feared watching with McCain saying, “I bet he’d probably get pretty angry and lit up if his team was losing.”
Obama did even better in a question of who they would choose to be their child’s teacher, winning 55% to 44%. This result was not a surprise considering that, regardless of whether one agrees with Obama, people observing the two candidates should at least agree that Obama is by far the more intellectual of the two. (This is the very reason why some Republicans are voting against him.) It also helps for this poll that Obama has had years of experience teaching Constitutional law.
Beyond the polls, McCain is having difficulty getting people to hang around to listen to him at a rally. Radio Iowa gives this description:
I look up, about five minutes into McCain’s address and see a steady stream of people walking out of the rally. They just came to see Palin apparently.
I’m sure most readers are aware of the results of the real polls as they have been showing Obama surging. Gallup has shown Obama going from trailing after the conventions to taking a statistically significant five point lead. State polls have generally been closer but, especially considering that they are not obtained as rapidly as national polls and therefore lag behind, they are also looking favorable for Obama. Among states which have shifted in recent elections, Obama is leading in Iowa, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. He has a strong lead in several polls in one red state, Colorado. The polls are closer in several other states, with some polls showing a lead for Obama in red states such as Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and Virginia. With leads in Ohio and Indiana in some polls Obama has a chance to sweep the entire Big Ten region, assuming he also holds onto current leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
McCain has clearly lost his post-convention bounce. This is partialy due to a tremendous drop in Sarah Palin’s popularity, with two different polls showing a tremendous drop in her approval. She is still helping to energize the far right base, but there are far fewer hard core Republicans than there were during the Bush years. McCain gambled both his poltical career and the future of the country on Sarah Palin. Now that he has lost that bet it might be difficult for him to come up with anything else to catch up with Obama.
