Pew Research Center For the People & the Press
Likely Voters:
Obama 46%
McCain 46%
Undecided 8%
Registered Voters:
Obama 46%
McCain 44%
Undecided 10%
The poll was taken from September 9-14. The MOE is +/- 2.5% for both LV and RV.
Poll link:
http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/450.pdf----------
I don't know what the more professional poll watchers think about the accuracy of Pew, but to me, the most interesting part are the demographic breakdowns. Because the sample size of the poll is huge (2500+), even many of the subsambles have fairly low MOEs. The religion subsamples are interesting:
Whoever wins the Catholic vote usually wins the election. Obama is ahead by 1 - but McCain is making headway. McCain also shored up support among Evangelicals, most likely due to the Palin pick.
According to Pew, 27% of the electorate are swing voters - those who are leaning toward a candidate, might vote for the other candidate or are undecided. Here's a partisan breakdown of those swing voters:
As usual, Independents are the most likely to swing. Moderate/liberal Republicans are second - but McCain has made very good headway in decreasing the Republican swing vote since August.
Another other interesting question Pew asks is a word association game - what's the one word that best describes a particular candidate:
"Inexperienced" is the top word participants used to describe both Obama AND Palin. But many more people used it to describe Obama than Palin.
There's a lot more at the link.
