Some trends over the last few days
Let's take another look at the poll model trend lines over the last few days. I've shown this graph a couple times so far, and I want to point out the last 6 days.
On October 25th, the models broke from the steady state they have been holding for about two weeks. This occurred right after the first of the new emails broke that the Administration knew Benghazi was a terror attack within the first 2 hours of the incident.
Since then, we are seeing a slow increase in support for Romney across all of the models. They have all moved about 0.6 of point in the last 6 days. During the same period we have seen significant erosion of Obama job approval rating.
Note that the two things that are not tracking this movement are the RCP average itself and Rasmussen's daily track. In the case of RCP, the new polls moving into the average have offset the Romney gains by increasing their Democrat sample. Rasmussen has a similar problem, but that is caused by his typical sampling issue over weekends.
Thanks Dave. Have you seen the new poll out in Oregon? Obama is leading but only at 47%. That can't be a good sign for him in other places.
ReplyDeleteYep, I saw that. He is still very likely to win that state, but it is a good sign of how strong Romney is running everywhere.
DeleteDave,
ReplyDeleteCurious of your thoughts about the effect of Sandy and whether it helps, hurts, or has no effect on Obama.
I feel like it helps a bit at the margins, if for nothing else, Romney appeared to be surging and it sort froze everything.
Still think Romney is in for a bigger than expected win, but I felt like the bottom was falling out for Obama.
I don't see it having an effect, except on the margins. Let me make a couple points about this:
Delete1) The professional campaign people are all spun up "OMG!! He's going pull this back, he stopped the momentum!! He is going to smack Romney around with those FEMA quotes!!". I don't buy it. When you are a professional at anything, you tend to think that what you do has tremendous impact on things. But there are larger forces at work here than can be changed by winning the last few news cycles or optics.
2) The election is about the economy, not who can find the FEMA offices.
3) The Obama people and Media (but I repeat myself) that think this will power him to a win by moving votes and finally (after 4 years) making him look presidential are the same ones that thought Big Bird, binders, and Lena Dunham were good ideas. I'm not impressed with their instincts.
4) People are complaining that this will drive Benghazi out of the headlines. The problem is that it wasn't in the headlines, the Media has spiked the story, except for Fox, and they aren't letting up on it. The voters have gotten the story anyway as can be seen by Romney's increase over the last 6 days.
5) If it hurts anyone, it marginally hurts Obama. He is not meeting his early vote numbers, especially in Cuyahoga County. He had this week to catch up, and he will lose at least 3 days in Ohio and Virginia. It doesn't matter in Pennsylvania, since they don't have early voting.
I think it will have no effect, overall. Romney really doesn't have much higher that he can go. There aren't many undecideds left. And no one is changing their mind based on this storm.