Stop press! Obama over 50% in two final presidential opinion polls
With polls opening today at 7am, President Obama, has nudged ahead of challenger Mitt Romney in the final opinion polls, according to the website Newsmax and the Washington Post.
Washington Post: Who do you think will win?
Both the final IBD/TIPP presidential poll and the Washington Post-ABC poll put Obama at 50 per cent or over for the first time since July. . The final IBD/TIPP presidential tracking poll finds Obama at 50.3 per cent to 48.7 per cent for Romney, with just one per cent preferring other candidates, says Newsmax.The margin of error is +/- 3.7 per cent.
The Washington Post-ABC poll divides 50 percent for President Obama and 47 percent for his challenger, Republican Mitt Romney, in its final weekend release . Responders, asked who they thought would win, handed it to Obama: 55% to Romney's 35%.
In regular polls since early July, neither candidate ever gathered more than 50 percent of likely voters, says the Post and neither ever slipped below 46 percent.
"Still, hitting 50 percent is a first for Obama since the poll in early July, with Sunday interviews marking Obama’s single best day of the tracking poll. Just over 10 days ago, the tracking poll see-sawed in Romney’s direction by the same, slender 50 to 47 percent."
The Post adds, "It is clearer that the president made progress in other areas. He has re-gained an advantage when it comes to understanding the economic problems people are having in the country, and, over the final week, has drawn back to running evenly with Romney in voter trust to handle job No. 1: the economy."
For the entire tracking poll, a total of 9,397 randomly selected adults were interviewed by telephone (conventional landline and cellphone) over the course of 18 days,
Newsmax said that in the IBD/TIPP poll, Mitt Romney was behind in all age groups, except for those over 65, in which he has a 53 per cent to 46 per cent edge.The results also show a pronounced gender split, with men favoring Romney 54 per cent to 46 per cent, while women prefer Obama 55 per cent to 44 per cent.
Married women gave Romney a six-point advantage, while unmarried women opted for Obama by a substantial 29 points.
For the first time since IBD/TIPP started the poll, says Newsmax, President Obama got 40 per cent of the white vote. "That's a critical threshold he had to hit in order to make a win possible," says Newsmax.
Romney now holds a 17-point lead among Catholic voters.
The website said that due to Hurricane Sandy, the tracking poll was suspended on 28 October and resumed on 3 November.