Poll Shock: CNN Poll of Battleground States Shows Romney With Eight Point Lead, 51-43

Interesting.

Of course, the Gallup poll -- which I've come to take as the best poll -- has Obama up by five points at the moment. Over a week ago Romney began losing ground and Obama gaining it; as Allah notes, though, this spike occurred before the ObamaTax decision, so it can't be that.

Personally I think it's mostly noise. It happens. Romney goes up, then Obama goes up; but both remain, over time, around 46-47%.

Among registered voters, note.

But given that this has been going on for a week and a half, and the five point lead is sort of big (Obama's biggest lead in a while, since May), there must be some reason, apart from noise, his numbers are going up. I can't imagine what that could be, unless, as Allah suggests, it's Hispanics breaking even harder for him than they did in 2008.

I do expect there will be some kind of Roberts Bounce. The less informed voters tend to be swayed by headlines like "Obama wins." Anything positive like that moves their needles. But will the bounce persist? I doubt it; they usually don't anymore. I can't imagine too many people are going to care that the Supreme Court blessed a law they hated even before it was contested in court at all -- that is, they didn't previously need a court to tell them they didn't like it, so I don't think this will swing them very much.

Plus, as it gets out that Roberts flipped his vote, they'll be even less inclined to say the Supreme Court is an important final arbiter.

I don't know what any of this conflicting poll stuff means.

I do know that voters vote on underlying conditions, and those underlying conditions seem to be deterioriating, quickly, at the worst possible time for Obama.

Obama needs a sudden burst of good economic news now. Instead, the best he can hope for is stasis. And what he's rooting against is yet a second dip.

Rasumussen Sees No Lift For Obama: And Rasmussen has not been very favorable to Romney, either. Their poll of likely voters has Romney on top, 46-44. A week before, they had it exactly the other way around -- Obama 46, Romney 44.

posted by Ace at 06:06 PM

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