Daily Presidential Tracking Poll (Romney +4, but 0bama approval still high @ 48%)

Rasmussen Reports ^ | 9-2-12 | Scott Rasmussen

[GR_Jr.]

he Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows Mitt Romney attracting support from 48% of voters nationwide, while President Obama earns 44% of the vote. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

Just prior to this past week's Republican National Convention, Romney trailed the president by two. Today’s four-point advantage confirms that the GOP hopeful has received the expected convention bounce.

A president’s job approval rating is one of the best indicators for assessing his chances of reelection. Typically, the president’s job approval rating on Election Day will be close to the share of the vote he receives. Currently, 48% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's job performance. Fifty-one percent (51%) at least somewhat disapprove of the job Obama is doing (see trends).

[Norman Bates]

All of that is built into the margin of error and effectively minimized through scientific polling methods (i.e., polling 600 instead of 60).

Hang ups are overcome through proper model construction based on known voter registration statistics.

You can look at it as being similar to the effective elimination of stock-specific risk through the creation of a diversified portfolio.

[SaraJohnson]

We can’t believe any polls during an election. No one has any integrity to trust anymore. It’s all professional propaganda gaming.

[LS]

Well said. The difficulty this time around is that while both national and state polls are close, so many of the assumptions are questionable, I.e.oversampling Dems.

The other difficulty this time around is that so much of the micro data seems to point to a landslide, or a very big victory for Romney. For ex, the fact that by almost every poll shows CT close and "in play", the poll from northern VA showing Obama barely up in a region he won by 23%, the agreement of every poll that the indies have swung heavily toward Romney. On the other hand, while the trend is good, Romney still trails in NV and hasn't opened up any room in OH.

So my optimistic side goes with the former data.