What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls - October 18, 2008
While voters seem a bit more optimistic this week about the economy, the tide is still rolling strongly in the direction of big Democratic gains on Election Day.
While voters seem a bit more optimistic this week about the economy, the tide is still rolling strongly in the direction of big Democratic gains on Election Day.
Barack Obama scored a hat trick in the presidential debates: A plurality of voters said he won all three, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
The short term impact of the third debate will be to help Barack Obama. But the long term implications may give John McCain a needed boost. Obama looked good, but McCain opened the tax-and-spend issue in a way that might prevail.
Before Wednesday night's debate, Team Obama sent out pre-debate "talking points," which Politico.com posted, that hit John McCain for his "erratic and unsteady" response to the economic crisis, while lauding Barack Obama's "steady leadership."
With less than three weeks left until the election, voters still trust Barack Obama more than John McCain on seven out of 10 key electoral issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports.
Despite skyrocketing gas prices over the past year, just 37% of Americans say they are more likely now to buy an energy-efficient hybrid car than they were 12 months ago. Over half (52%) say they are not more likely to buy one.
Fifty-five percent (55%) of U.S. voters say the media coverage of this year’s presidential campaign is more biased than in previous election years, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
The Democrats’ lead remains unchanged in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that, if given the choice, 46% of voters would choose their district’s Democratic candidate, while 38% would choose the Republican candidate.
For a while, I had expected to emerge mostly unscathed from the eight years of George W. Bush.
For anyone who followed the story of how and why Sarah Palin fired her state's public safety commissioner, last week's release of a legislative investigation that found she had violated state ethics statutes was anticlimactic. After all, everyone knows that she and her husband, Todd, tried to push Walt Monegan, then Alaska's public safety commissioner, to fire a state trooper named Mike Wooten, who was involved in a bitter divorce from Ms. Palin's sister -- and that after Mr. Monegan refused, he lost his job.
The good news just keeps on coming for Democrats. As we discussed last week, presidential nominee Barack Obama is the clear favorite to win a substantial victory in the race for the White House
John McCain's position in the Electoral College continued to deteriorate in the previous seven days. We are making the following adjustments, accordingly.
With the last of the presidential debates set for tonight, 60% of voters describe the first two debates as boring and are fairly evenly divided on whether the contests so far were informative or useless.
Sixty-two percent (62%) of Americans expect stock market values to be higher in five years than they are today, even after a month of highly-publicized troubles on Wall Street.
A Barack Obama victory in less than three weeks will mean many things at home and abroad. It will mean a new team on foreign and domestic policy and new political leadership for both the Democratic Party and the country. And it will mean, finally, the end of any excuse to listen to the self-involved, selfish and stupid rantings of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
The essence of this election season couldn't be simpler. The American public is so appalled at the condition of the country (which it unfairly, but not implausibly blames on the despised President Bush) that with fate casting John McCain in the role of Bush's surrogate, a majority actually is considering voting for Sen. Obama.
It certainly wasn’t the big-bang across-the-board tax-reform and tax-cut plan that I and others lobbied for. But John McCain’s “Pension and Family Security Plan” unveiled today on the campaign trail does have some solid pro-growth nuggets.
A day after the sixth and final Nobel Prize winner was announced, a plurality of Americans (40%) believe politics plays a role in deciding who is honored.
With Barack Obama’s campaign now crying foul at ads and comments from his Republican opponents, nearly one out of three voters (32%) say this year’s presidential race is more negative than most.
Over beers, Brian McConnell and his buddies came up with the idea to put a measure on the San Francisco ballot to rename a city sewage plant after President Bush. Ha, ha, ha.