# 31 The Polls Are All Over the Freaking Place

Either the American public is a lot dumber now than four years ago, or the Pew poll is way offbase.  How can Romney and Obama be tied with female voters, after ALL that Romney and Ryan have said about women's rights (or, in their case, women's non-rights), and after the various gaffes by Romney's Stepford wife-with-balls.  I mean, ya gotta have kahones to make the crazy comments she has made, and still show your face in public. Even Romney admitted that too much exposure will make her wear thin with the electorate.

On the other hand, we had to realize that the polls are fluid, and the first debate was a disaster for Obama--not from the point of view of the reality of what each candidate said, but from the appearance of what each candidate said. Obama's comments were more factually accurate; Romney's were...who knows what they were: he contradicted seveal of the positions he had taken previously, and he repeated "information" that had already been disproved by non-partisan sources; tell the same lie over and over, and people will start to believe it.

And, yet again on the other hand (yes, yes, this is our third hand), other polls have different results, including an indication that Obama has recovered from the initial dip after the first debate.

I'm not taking the Pew Poll very seriously, though I admit that probably some voters were swayed by Romney's smoothness (he writes here, not having seen the debate but trusting the near-unanimous reports about it).  I really wish James Carville was working with David Axelrod et al: Carville has a way of turning a phrase that makes his points strongly: "drag a hunnerd dollar bill through a trailer court, and who knows what you'll turn up."  Nasty, but Memorable.

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[The Pew Poll, by Tom Kludt, TPM]

In the first national poll to be conducted entirely after the opening presidential debate, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney now leads President Barack Obama by 4 points.

The poll, conducted by Pew Research Center from Thursday through Sunday and released on Monday, shows Romney leading Obama among likely voters nationwide, 49 percent to 45 percent. That's a stark contrast from Pew's mid-September poll after both parties' conventions, which showed Obama up 8 points among likely voters.

The dramatic 12-point swing in Pew's poll from Obama to Romney is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence to date that the president has paid a political price for his listless performance in the Denver debate. But the complete suite of post-debate surveys from national pollsters is only beginning to emerge, and the early indications are of a less dramatic shift than Pew is showing.

Republican-leaning Rasmussen found Romney leading by 2 points in its Saturday release, which was based on findings from the tracking period of Oct. 3-5.  But in Rasmussen Monday's poll, conducted entirely after the debate and partially following the release of Friday's encouraging jobs report, the two candidates were tied again. Gallup reported on Monday that Obama and Romney were tied in the three days immediately following the debate, after Obama led by 5 in the three days prior.  But on Monday, Gallup's tracking -- which is based on a 7-day rolling average -- Obama again led by 5.

The PollTracker Average now shows Romney overtaking Obama to claim a nearly 3-point lead after the president led for the better portion of the last month....

A separate poll released by Gallup on Monday showed that a whopping 72 percent of debate watchers declared Romney the winner, while only 20 percent said the same of Obama -- the largest margin of victory in the history of Gallup's post-debate polling.

Pew's poll also suggests that voters have given Romney a second look following his stellar debate performance. The two candidates now run even on the question of who is the stronger leader, a category that Obama won by 13 points in Pew's September poll. Voters still view the president as the more honest and truthful candidate by a margin of 44 percent to 39 percent, but the president had a 14 point advantage on the same question a month ago. And Obama's 18-point lead with women shown in Pew's previous poll is also gone, with the two candidates now tied among female voters.

In another blow to the Obama campaign, whose central message has been to move the country forward and away from the old ideas put forth by Republicans, voters identify Romney as the candidate with new ideas, 47 percent to 40 percent. Moreover, Romney's favorability rating spiked 5 points to 50 percent in Monday's poll. Obama's favorability rating, long his most resilient attribute as a candidate, fell from 55 percent last month to 49 percent.

On a host of policy issues -- the budget deficit, the job situation, taxes, Medicare, health care and foreign policy -- Romney has either expanded his edge from last month, overtaken the president or narrowed Obama's edge.

Take Medicare, for example. The president was widely viewed as the better candidate to handle the nation's health care system for senior citizens in September, 51 percent to 38 percent; today, the president's advantage is only 3 points, 46 percent to 43 percent. Obama's previous 15-point edge on foreign policy is now only a 4-point advantage. On taxes, Obama's 6-point lead from last month has turned into a 4-point advantage for Romney. And a majority of voters have doubts about Obama's ability to take on the paramount issue of the 2012 campaign: 54 percent said the president does not know how to turn around the economy, while 44 percent said he does....

Pew conducted its poll Oct. 4-7 using live phone interviews with 1,201 registered voters and 1,112 likely voters nationwide. The margin of error is 3.3 percentage points for registered voters and 3.4 percentage points for likely voters.