Two days after the second presidential debate, new polls may help shed some light on how President Obama's well-received performance is affecting his support across the country.
Three new national tracking polls are out today, one from Gallup, one from Rasmussen and one from IBD/TIPP. It is important to remember that tracking polls are "rolling averages," that is, they are aggregates of data taken daily and packaged in a report that covers anywhere from three days to a week of public sentiment.
That approach tends to soften spikes in the national mood, and it also slows down the responsiveness of the polls to new information. Usually it takes several days to start seeing any meaningful data.
However, some information can be gleaned before then.
Two of the tracking polls show Romney in the lead. The Gallup poll has him way out in front, with a 7-point advantage over the president. However, the Gallup poll covers the most amount of time prior to the second debate, Oct. 11 to Oct. 17. That means it averages in the most pro-Romney data, because Romney was soaring the week prior to the second debate.
The IDB/TIPP poll covers nearly as much pre-debate data as the Gallup poll, but it shows Romney and Obama tied.
Well, polls often show different results, and tracking polls tend to magnify the differences between them. For example, Gallup showed Romney several points up last week. That result might be spot on, or it might be off because of randomness in the sample. But that data will be used in every Gallup tracking poll for the next week.
In the same way, the IBD polls last week didn't show a huge lead for Romney. Correct or incorrect, those results will be reflected in the average for an entire week afterward.
Ideally, averaging data over several days will account for outliers, but if there is something about the methodology of a particular poll that introduces error, the tracking polls will make it look bigger.
More interesting is the Rasmussen poll. It only covers three days, so the post-debate data is a larger proportion of the information contained in the poll. It shows Romney up, but by a smaller amount. Obama has gained relative to his position prior to the debate.
In addition, Rasmussen uses automated "robo-calls" to gather data, a method that only reaches landline phones and tends to skew toward older, more conservative voters, so Obama may not be a full 2 points behind.
Another Rasmussen poll, this time in Ohio, was taken entirely after the second debate. It shows Obama ahead of Romney by 1 point, but that is unchanged from a week ago.
There will be new, cleaner data soon, but for now, the early polls look like Obama has made some progress in the national polls, but not nearly as much as Romney did after the first debate. In addition, he appears to be holding strong in Ohio, the most important of the swing states.
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