McCain pulls dramatically ahead (or does he? see update))

The Gallup daily tracking poll now shows McCain ahead of Obama by 48 to 45 percent. But that’s nothing compared to what Jake Tapper reports at ABC:

Not the daily tracking poll, the actual Gallup poll, has Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., pulling ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

The numbers among registered voters are 50 percent to 46 percent—and 54 percent to 44 percent among likely voters.

A ten point McCain lead! That is sensational news—for those eager to see the triumph of today’s deeply unprincipled Republican party and another four years of neocon rule presided over by an intellectually inert septuagenarian committed to legalizing 12 million illegal aliens and opening America’s borders to the Third World, all in the name, of course, of “Country First.”

Tapper supplies no link to this actual Gallup poll as distinct from the daily tracking poll (I’m not clear on the difference), and I was unable to find it at the Gallup site. (Here it is, thanks to a reader.)

Update: Paul of Powerline says the 10 point gap in Gallup poll is not meaningful. He writes:

Gallup/USA Today has a poll that shows John McCain leading Barack Obama by 10 percentage points—54 to 44. The weight of that poll is enough to put McCain ahead in the RCP average.

Unless and until we see other results like it, I discount the Gallup/USA Today poll. More probative, I think, are the two tracking polls I’ve been following all season—Gallup and Rasmussen. Gallup has McCain leading by 3 points. Just prior to the Democratic convention, this poll had the race dead even. Rasmussen has McCain up by 1 point, a swing of 4 points from where the race was before the conventions.

So the best evidence right now is that the Republicans obtained a 3 to 4 point net bounce during the convention season.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 08, 2008 01:12 AM | Send