The ABC/WaPo poll - October 1, 2012

Likely Voter, 813 sample size, Obama leads 49-47, 2% undecided.

After a lot of digging, I was able to find the party identification of this poll.  They did not include it in their PDF release, but they did include it on the Washington Post website.  I don't know why a pollster wouldn't include that information in the public release.  Party identification is the number 1 indicator of voting preference, so it is always germane to the poll results.

Let's start with the reweighting.  This poll is at a top level looking better with a D/R/I of 33/30/35.  The D+3 is considered defensible this year, however this poll is still over sampling independents.  They report an even preference between the candidates for independents.  Plugging the numbers into the turnout models we get:

O+2 - Current result
O+4.8 - 2008 turnout
R+0.8 - 2010 turnout
R+0.9 - 2004 turnout
R+2.4 - Rasmussen Party ID

Looking further into the internals of this poll we get some very interesting results:

On the core ecomonic issues we see the following:

 O -  R
47 - 47 Handling economy
49 - 44 Taxes
45 - 48 Deficit
48 - 44 Healthcare
47 - 43 Medicare

On the foreign policy front:

 O -  R
53 - 39 Terrorism
49 - 44 International affairs

However of great interest to me is this 78% of voters are very or somewhat worried about the nation's economy over the next 4 years. 61% of voters are very or somewhat worried about their personal financial situation over the next 4 years.

I find it odd that with this high of a "wrong track" result that Obama is leading (even though it is slightly) in the core economic numbers.  My suspicion is that his lead in these areas are soft (if they exist at all).

The terrorism number is likely to take a large hit as the Benghazi questions continue to swirl.  I find Obama's weakness on the International affairs question to be interesting and not a good sign for him.