With three weeks and a day left in this campaign cycle, Barack Obama seems to be expanding his narrow lead into something more substantial. That’s certainly the impression provided by the latest big national survey, the Washington Post-ABC poll, just out today.
The poll shows up Obama up 53%-43% among likely voters. The previous Post-ABC poll at the beginning of the month had Obama up 50%-46%.
The internals of the poll are even more troubling for Team McCain. Obama’s favorability rating is up to 64%, while McCain’s has dropped to 52%. Over half of respondents volunteered the economy as the most important issue, and among them, Obama’s leading by a 62%-33% margin. And Obama now leads McCain as the candidate deemed best able to conduct the right kind of tax policy by 11%; the effort to bash Obama on taxes has, of course, been the centerpiece of McCain’s strategy to deal with the economic crisis.
Is Obama’s lead too big to be overcome? The Post notes that “turning around a late double-digit deficit would be unprecedented in the modern era,” though it offers several examples of leads larger than Obama’s being reduced dramatically in the home stretch.