Fox News Poll: It’s a Three-Point Race
According to a Fox News poll released Thursday, Senator Barack Obama’s lead on Sen. John McCain is decreasing significantly.
Fox News released a poll last week that had Obama up by 9%, 49% vs. 40%. This week, however, the gap is only 3%: 47% for Obama against 44% for McCain.
The Fox News poll comes at a time when other polls also show the race to be tightening considerably.
The major reason for the change in just one week time is that Independent voters are slowly turning to McCain: where Obama held a 9% lead among independent voters one week ago, that gap is now only 5%. Catholic voters, another key swing group, are now evenly split, 46% vs. 46%. Last week, Obama held an 11 point lead among such voters.
“Independent voters have long been regarded as one of the keys to this race and these results may foreshadow a tightening in the battleground states where independents carry disproportionate weight,” says Ernie Paicopolos, a principal of Opinion Dynamics Corporation.
Another major reason for McCain’s surge in the Fox News poll is that he has improved his position among the base. Where 83% of Republicans said they supported McCain a week ago, 88% said so now. Obama too does well among Democrats (89%), but he already did so last week (88%).
According to another recent poll, conducted by Rasmussen, McCain is especially improving his numbers due to the economic crisis: where the far majority of voters considered Obama best able to deal with the economy only a few weeks ago, the latest Rasmussen poll said that McCain held a slight lead on this subject (2%).
Fox News says that Obama is still considered best able to deal with the economy, but that his lead on this issue is less big than it once was: he had a 15% lead on the economy one week ago, today only 8%. That is still significant, of course, but considering the fact that Obama can only win if he beats McCain easily on the number one issue voters care about, the economy, these figures should worry the Obama campaign somewhat.
Meanwhile, the poll shows that both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin are not exactly healthy for their running mate: 52% said they were not comfortable with the prospect of Biden as vice president, 64% said the same about Palin.
One of the major reasons Palin’s numbers are worse than Biden’s is that 33% of Republican voters consider her to be unqualified for the job. Only 20% of Democrats say the same about Biden. If Palin would succeed in driving those numbers down a bit, she and Biden will have approximately the same kind of support, or better, tolerance.
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Just ahead of McCain and shaking hands with Follieri appears to be Rick Davis–McCain’s top aide and now co-manager of his campaign, who accompanied him on the trip and advised the government of Montenegro. A few months after McCain’s yacht party, Follieri strengthened his ties to McCain’s orbit by retaining Rick Davis’s well-connected Washington lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, and offering Davis both an investment deal and help in securing the Catholic vote for McCain’s presidential bid. Follieri, who posed as Vatican chief financial officer in order to win friends and investments, pleaded guilty Wednesday in a Manhattan district court to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering. As part of the plea, Follieri admitted to misappropriating at least $2.4 million of investor money and redirecting it to foreign personal bank accounts that were disguised as business accounts.
The photograph substantiates reports that in late August, 2006, McCain celebrated his 70th birthday aboard a yacht, the Celine Ashley, rented by A-list con man Raffaello Follieri and his then-movie star girlfriend Anne Hathaway.
In the photograph, taken in Montenegro at the end of August, McCain is shown boarding the yacht ramp towards the smiling Follieri and Hathaway.