Gallup has released the first daily tracking poll of the presidential campaign season. It shows Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama by 47 to 45 percent, basically because Romney carried the independents in the sample by 45-39.
The polls will be coming thick and fast from now, and (of course this is the nature of a tracking poll) Gallup will post a new horserace number every day (check Gallup.com any day that you feel starved for fresh poll numbers and I suspect you’ll see a link to that day’s tracking numbers).
The numbers are a little surprising, since most, but not all polls I’ve seen recently had Obama ahead, including a non-tracking poll by Gallup released last week. The Romney lead is within the margin of error and polls taken in April don’t tell us much about what will happen in November.
(In case you are new to this stuff, here’s how a tracking poll works: Gallup is making about 400 fresh interviews every day. The most recent number will always be the combined showing of the five most recent days, so every day the most recent numbers will replace those from five days earlier.)
Irrelevant (to both candidates)
Why do (or report on) a poll that doesn’t account for the electoral college?
Besides, how much can we rely on a poll that indicates that 86% of all the voters are very likely to vote? Sampling bias, in this case, is probably due to the fact that no one wants to talk to the pollsters unless they’re fired up. I’m not sure which way they’re fired up, but these people are NOT representative of the potentially voting population, which show up to the polls at a rate of about 50-70% of registered voters, not 86%.
But is it an outlier?
CNN has a poll today showing Obama with a 9-point lead over Romney, and that is outside the margin of error.
What this tells us is
the Obama meme of a republican “war on women” has been a dismal failure with independents, the people it was most intended to influence.
wrong
Obama still completely kills Mitt with women.
Yeah, the GOP…
……”the Party By and For Women”! That being said, who do the polls show winning the 2016 Super Bowl?
meh
The absolute numbers are irrelevant; but watching the trends in the polls will be interesting.
Sampling issues
Getting a reliable daily sample is problematic.