by Mark Silva
Hope springs eternal, or at least daily.
In the event that it feels like polls have taken over the electoral process, the Gallup Poll - which has run a closely-watched daily tracking survey of voters in the presidential election contest this year - plans to start a daily measure of the president-elect's popularity and voter-optimism after Election Day.
This is new territory: During the transition to a new White House, Gallup plans to ask voters daily about their:
Optimism about the new administration.
Opinion of the president-elect, favorable, unfavorable.
The daily obsession with polling will carry on not only during the transition, it appears, but also during the new president's new term: Gallup plans to run a daily tracking survey of presidential job approval after the inauguration of the 44th president - as opposed to the biweekly gauges that Gallup has offered during President Bush's terms.
Meanwhile, Gallup has found this, in the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain:
-- Twenty one percent of all those who will vote have voted in early voting, and "they skew toward Obama.''
-- Among those voters surveyed who "worried about money yesterday,'' 58 percent said they support Obama, and 35 percent support McCain. Among those who didn't worry about money yesterday: McCain 49, Obama 45.
Through the summer, notes Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, Obama held an apparent advantage of 3 percentage points over McCain. But since the Wall Street crisis hit, Obama's lead has widened.
The "environment we're in'' will have a tremendous impact on the election, Newport noted at a reception for clients in Washington last night.
Bush has gone from "the highest approval rating in history'' (90 percent after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks) to a near-record low - 25 percent at the latest Gallup measure, Newport noted about the sitting president. That is still not a record low. Harry Truman bottomed out at 22 percent, in 1952.
Newport promises an official Gallup prediction about the outcome of the 2008 election on Monday. Meanwhile, he is saying only this, officially, publicly: "We will have a U.S. senator as the next president.''
But he also said this last night at his reception for clients of the poll in downtown Washington: "No matter how you look at it, ''Obama is likely to win the popular vote and certainly is likely to win the Electoral College vote on Tuesday.
"Barack Obama's coalition,'' Newport suggests, is basically put together by anyone who is "not the traditional white voter" in the United States.
"The election, at this point, is dependent on turnout - who can bring the most people to the polls,'' Newport says.
Even though there has been a dispute over likely voters and registered voters and how pollsters model it all, and, even though Republicans have the best history of turning out their voters, Newport suggests, the numbers are breaking Obama's way.
"When the dust settles, Obama may do better than the polls show, or he may do worse,'' Newport says, "but we just don't have enough evidence that supports'' the idea that any underperformance by Obama is indicative of the so-called "Bradley effect,'' in which a black candidate may not perform as well in the election as he did in the polls.
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