Help Us, Barack Obama. You're Our Only Hope!

David Weigel | September 24, 2008

The new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Barack Obama jumping to a nine-point lead over John McCain, up from a two-point deficit after the Republican convention. As the Post points out:

As a point of comparison, neither of the last two Democratic nominees -- John F. Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000 -- recorded support above 50 percent in a pre-election poll by the Post and ABC News.

The reason? Take a guess.

More voters trust Obama to deal with the economy, and he currently has a big edge as the candidate who is more in tune with the economic problems Americans now face. He also has a double-digit advantage on handling the current problems on Wall Street, and as a result, there has been a rise in his overall support.

Polling aggregators give Obama only a modest lead, mostly due a 2-point McCain lead in the Battleground Poll. Margin of error and all that stuff. But the trend is crystal clear: Obama had lost his footing after the GOP convention, but McCain lost momentum after the crisis on Wall Street started building. Even after five days of a consistent message (Regulation today! Regulation tomorrow! Regulation forever!), McCain remains the Republican candidate trying to follow a Republican president, facing off against the nominee of a party that people trust on the economy. McCain's been modestly successful in blunting the Democratic edge (by this point in 1992, Clinton was blowing Bush away on voters worried about the economy), but modest only takes you so far. In this case, to 44 percent of the vote.