Rasmussen: Obama 43, Romney 50

Rasmussen has Romney opening his biggest lead yet.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows Mitt Romney earning 50% of the vote and President Obama attracting 43% support. Four percent (4%) would vote for a third party candidate, while another three percent (3%) are undecided.

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This is the first time Romney has reached the 50% level of support and is his largest lead ever over the president. It comes a week after a disappointing jobs report that raised new questions about the state of the economy.

Ed thinks this might be about Obama's new/old gay marriage position, or at least the shakiness in leadership on display with Bumblin' Joe forcing a reluctant president to come clean.

I initially thought it would be very unlikely that this would move any votes at all.
1, if someone were strongly anti-gay-marriage, or strongly pro-gay-marriage, I have to think they would have chosen a horse already and would not be suddenly reacting to the revelation that the Democrats like gay marriage and the Republicans don't.

2, I don't think marginal voters -- swing voters -- follow things closely enough to even notice how the sausage gets made. I think it's remarkable enough that the least politically interested voters even hear of "sausage" in the first place, never mind the process for making it.

But there is some chance this Obama's declaration did move some voters. If it's the case that, say, only 90% of natural Republican/conservative voters had yet decided to vote for Romney -- if around 10% of such voters were holding back support, due to concerns/anger about Romney -- I guess it is possible that Obama's announcement crystalized the situation for that kind of voter, and might have pushed him towards supporting Romney.

However, Gallup has Romney losing a point and Obama gaining a point, so that Romney's lead (with registered voters) is down to 46-45.

Meh. I like having confirmation in another poll for a big move. I'm going to chalk this up to noise.

Bonus: Andy U points this one out -- Romney leads Obama by 9 points on economic leadership.

Gallup calls this a "slight" lead.

posted by Ace at 01:13 PM

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