Even as the Gallup daily tracker moves several points in the direction of the president to kick off this holiday week, Rasmussen finds an electorate suddenly hungry for Republican leadership.
Yeah, yeah. I was shocked by it, too. But with virtually no polling data to speak of on this Monday evening, even the mundane gets a mention.
On to the numbers:
PRESIDENTIAL GENERAL ELECTION TRIAL HEATS:
NATIONAL (CNN/Opinion Research): Obama d. Romney (49-46)
NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Obama d. Romney (48-43)
NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Romney d. Obama (46-44)
DOWNBALLOT POLLING:
NY-11 (Global Strategy Group for Murphy): Rep. Michael Grimm (R) 47, Mark Murphy (D) 32
A few thoughts, as always, await you just past the jump ...
Last week, at this time, Rasmussen had Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama by two points, while the Gallup daily tracking poll had the Republican nominee up by a single point over the president.
Today, Gallup has the president staked to a five-point lead. The House of Ras, meanwhile, still has Mitt Romney leading by two points. This isn't a matter of the Ras-sies not seeing any movement in the race, however. It is more a matter of Rasmussen seeing a movement of about four points in the president's direction over the weekend, and then an immediate rebound back to the (Ras-sie) status quo.
Could Gallup find the same thing, eventually? Perhaps. Remember that Gallup has a seven-day sample, as opposed to Rasmussen's three-day sample. The holiday is liable to muck this up a little bit, but I'd say by the middle to end of this week, we'll have a better feel for whether Rasmussen just saw the same ephemeral movement, or whether Rasmussen was off the fairway.
Rasmussen did see one somewhat surprising movement this week—they had a dramatic sharpening in the Congressional generic ballot test. For the first time in over four months, the Ras-sies have the Congressional test at near parity (GOP +1).
In other polling news (admittedly, there ain't much of it):
- CNN's poll of the presidential race comes in precisely where it did at the end of May—Obama +3. But digging into the underlying numbers of this poll, there is a whole lot of strange details in there. I don't buy Mitt Romney up eight points in the "battleground states," for example, especially if (as CNN claims) Barack Obama is claiming 25 percent of the conservative vote. You can click the tab for more of those underlying data points. There's a lot of "hmm" in there, to be sure.
- One surprising, and potentially winning, stat also lives in those cross tabs of the CNN poll. After the Supreme Court ruling on Thursday, stunned right-wingers tried to recover their swagger by saying that this decision would be the one to galvanize Republicans and get them fired up to head to the polls and exact their revenge. It is only the first look at the state of the electorate post-decision, but this poll does not bear that out. Sixty-five percent of Democrats describe themselves as either "extremely" or "very" enthusiastic about the election. Only 52 percent of Republicans said the same.
But, here again, there was some strange dissonance in the numbers. When you broke the same question by ideology: Conservatives (58 percent) were considerably more likely to fall in those top two tiers than liberals (47 percent). Search me for reasons why that would be the case. Maybe there is a huge silent majority of liberal Republicans out there that are suddenly struck with malaise about this election, perhaps?