There was a modest slowdown in national polls around the 4th of July holiday, but it seems outlets are making up for lost time with plenty of new data for observers to pore over.
The latest WaPo/ABC poll, for example, shows Barack Obama up by a relatively comfortable margin, bolstered by a huge edge on economic issues, but John McCain continues to fare well on foreign policy, reality notwithstanding.
Sen. Barack Obama holds his biggest advantage of the presidential campaign as the candidate best prepared to fix the nation’s ailing economy, but lingering concerns about his readiness to handle international crises are keeping the race competitive, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Overall, the Democrat has a lead of 50 percent to 42 percent over Republican Sen. John McCain among registered voters nationwide, lifted by a big edge among women, and he has also regained an edge among political independents. But it is Obama’s 19-point lead on the economy that has become a particularly steep challenge for McCain.
Economic concerns continue to eclipse other issues, with half the country saying the economy will be “extremely important” to their vote. Gasoline and energy prices, which voters rarely mentioned at the start of the year, come in just behind. The Iraq war, which was again the subject of direct engagement between Obama and McCain yesterday, ranks third. A cluster of domestic issues, including education, health care and Social Security, ranked behind the war, as did the issue of terrorism.
McCain leads Obama on who would make a good commander in chief, who knows more about world affairs, who’s better able to combat terrorism, and who’s better suited to deal with an unexpected major crisis. On handling Iraq and Iran, the two are about tied. Obama, meanwhile, enjoys sizable leads over McCain on pretty much every domestic issue I can think of, and who would do more to improve the country’s image abroad.
And on the issue that I’ve been talking about for a while, “More than 4 in 10 Americans said they thought McCain’s age would hurt him in the White House.”
The latest NYT/CBS poll shows Obama leading McCain by six, 45% to 39%, but the accompanying article emphasized a different angle.
Americans are sharply divided by race heading into the first election in which an African-American will be a major-party presidential nominee, with blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The results of the poll, conducted against the backdrop of a campaign in which race has been a constant if not always overt issue, suggested that Mr. Obama’s candidacy, while generating high levels of enthusiasm among black voters, is not seen by them as evidence of significant improvement in race relations.
Oddly enough, the Obama campaign took a closer look at the exact same poll, reviewed the exact same data, and came to a very different conclusion. In fact, the campaign sent Greg Sargent a critique of the story, and found that the Times article “omitted … some straightforward points from their data,” including the fact that white voters prefer Obama on which candidate “cares about people like them” and is better able to “bringing about change.”
Instead of the “racial divisions” the Times article emphasizes, the poll numbers show Obama’s and McCain’s favorable ratings among whites nearly identical.