Just a quick exercise here. Just about all the major polling outfits have spoken today. So I just wanted to take a quick overview. This mixes tracking poll dailies and full polls. It also includes Internet polls we report at PollTracker but do not compute in our averages. But two days out it’s interesting to look at the snapshot it shows us.
Of eleven poll releases, three ties, three Obama +1, and one + .4 lead for Romney. Three more have Obama +3.
(CNN) Tie,
(Reuters) Obama +1,
(YouGov) Obama +2,
(ABC/WaPo) Obama +1,
(Pew) Obama +3,
(Zogby) Romney +.4,
(Rand) Obama +3.2,
(Rasmussen) Tie,
(NBC/WSJ) Obama +1,
(PPP) Obama +3,
(Politico/GWU) Tie
If you just do a simple average of these you get Obama +1.25
That number is different from the current PollTracker Average of Obama +.7 for a number of reasons. PollTracker doesn’t use a simple average; it doesn’t count tracking polls and full polls in the same way and it does not include Internet polls in its Average.
Looking at the trend chart we can also start to see the trend over the last six weeks. Obama takes a sharp drop after the first presidential debate. And Romney jumps up, though it’s worth noting that Romney’s trend up starts just before the debate. From there you see a pretty unmistakable trend. There are some wiggles here and there but Obama basically makes stead progress to exactly (49.1%) where he was at his pre-debate high. Meanwhile Romney bounces around but doesn’t really get past that post-debate surge. At the very end you can see undecideds start to come off the sidelines and both are beginning to trend up.
Next couple days will be interesting.
