maintaining his 5 point advantage . . . the internals in the gallup daily are confusing, though . . . .
PRINCETON, NJ -- The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update finds John McCain maintaining his five-point lead versus Barack Obama among registered voters, 49% to 44%.
McCain led Obama by five percentage points in Monday's report on the strength of a six-point increase in the percentage of voters choosing him on the presidential trial heat following the Republican National Convention. McCain's 49% support in today's three-day rolling average, based on Sept. 6-8 interviewing, is unchanged from Monday's report and matches McCain's high mark in Gallup tracking to date.
Gallup polling in recent days has been quite stable, showing McCain ahead of Obama by similar margins in each of the last four individual days of nightly tracking. McCain also had a 4-point lead over Obama among registered voters in the separate USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted this past weekend.
The GOP convention has clearly altered the structure of the race for now, which had shown Obama consistently ahead in the Gallup Poll Daily tracking updates for all but a few days from the time he clinched the nomination in early June until the end of last week. (To view the complete trend since March 7, 2008, click here.)
While the increased vote share a candidate receives following his convention usually diminishes, candidates who lead after the second convention usually remain the leader a month after the convention. This is based on a review of historical Gallup data since 1964 -- the first year for which Gallup could reliably measure convention bounces. The only possible exception to this general pattern occurred in 1980, when Jimmy Carter had a slim one-point advantage after the Democratic National Convention but he and Ronald Reagan were exactly tied one month after Carter was nominated for a second term.
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