Obama leading as the candidates head for the final turn

Posted by Nick Devlin

With less than one month to go until election day, Obama has put an even bigger margin between himself and McCain according to the sample polls. Now, I do not know how much I personally trust pre-election polls as they do not 100% represent the nation's attitude towards the candidates. However, these 658 registered voters that were used to derive this data are all that we have when trying to get a sense of what voters feel. The article states that Obama's recent jump in the polls is due to his reactions to the economic crisis, or more so the reactions of McCain to the economic crisis, as McCain's view that the economy is fundamentally strong seems to be losing him support. I mean, when you sit there and say the economy has strong fundamentals while it begins to crash and burn, how can you not expect to lose support? While McCain may have a good point in preaching a free-market economy with little regulation is still the way to go, the majority of people don't seem to be interested in anything that isn't immediate change. And we all know which candidate has been preaching "change" since day one. Another factor in Obama's current leap is the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Despite the back and forth bickering between pundits about who really won the debates, the polls show that the American public feels that Obama-Biden came out on top. Now again, I don't know how much i trust these polls, especially since this article is from msnbc, but I'll go along with it. The polls also show that the people are more confident that Obama will improve the economy, get us out of the mortgage crisis and have better methods to deal with the energy and gas problems. Obama also seems to have been able to sway a lot of Independent voters with his performance in the debate, as he has taken the lead away from McCain according to Independent polls. In my opinion, none of these polls really mean too much. Even though Obama's lead is above the error margin, samples never perfectly reflect the whole population. With two debates left, there are still a lot of voters that can be swayed; especially as the market continues to decline despite the Bail Out. All in all, be prepared for a lot of pandering from both tickets as they attempt to gain votes in battleground states. I mean, Palin has already started with her pleas to Florida.
LINK TO ARTICLE