Obama’s Tracking Poll Troubles
03 May 2008 1:15 pm by Taylor Marsh
Guest post by Scan
I’ve said before that these tracking polls should normally be taken with a grain of salt, but when we see similar patterns in both, it’s worth noting.
Hillary has held the lead in the Rasmussen tracking poll for three days (after being down for weeks), and is now ahead 47% – 44%. Rasmussen keeps the tracking data in a table instead of a graph. This makes it harder to see trends, so I decided to make my own graph tracking the last nine days of polling data.
According to this, Hillary’s win in Pennsylvania didn’t immediately change the numbers significantly. The shift occurred early this week.
In the Gallup poll, Clinton and Obama have been essentially tied since the Pennsylvania primary. Before then, Obama had been holding a pretty solid lead for most of April. Today is no different: Tied at 47%. The most noticeable change here has been the Obama vs McCain data from this week.
As Gallup reported Friday, John McCain has now moved into a significant lead over Obama among national registered voters for the general election, while he about ties with Clinton.
I personally think that both tracking polls overestimate McCain’s support, and we can look at some other polls to support that. For that reason, I’d say that Hillary is actually beating McCain at this point, while Obama is stuck in a tie.
One thing that is puzzling… in both Gallup and Rasmussen, we see that something dramatic occurred early this week that caused Obama’s poll numbers to take a big hit. Does anyone know what that might have been?
Oh…Wriiiight.
Open thread.
