DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Mitt Romney has taken a narrow national lead, tightened the gender gap and expanded his edge over President Barack Obama on who would best grow the economy.
A new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Tracking Poll of 1,000 likely voters — taken from Sunday through Thursday of last week — shows Romney ahead of Obama by two points, 49 to 47 percent. That represents a three-point swing in the GOP nominee’s direction from a week ago but is still within the margin of error. Obama led 49 percent to 48 percent the week before.
Romney has not led in the poll since the beginning of May.
Across the 10 states identified by POLITICO as competitive, Romney leads 50 to 48 percent.
Not quite as good as the Gallup poll has been, but this is another indication that momentum is on Romney’s side. They always like to talk about a “gender gap”, but get this:
Women propelled Romney’s move into first place in the poll — a majority of which was conducted before the Hofstra debate. Obama’s 11-point advantage a week ago among the crucially important group dwindled to 6 points. The Democratic incumbent still leads 51 to 45 percent with women, but Romney leads by 10 points among men.
It really looks like Obama has a gender gap among men. The economy is paramount. Obama can’t win on the economy, so he has to make the election about something else. He had hoped that to be foreign policy, but the Benghazi assassination messed that up. One of those “bumps in the road” that’s “not optimal”, I guess.
ADDENDUM:
Here is the methodology for the poll. You can see that they are now weighting it nearly one-to-one Republican versus Democrat. I think that is a much more likely picture of the expected turnout. I expected to see this. As the time is drawing near, they don’t want their predictions to be too out of line with the actual results. The D+9 polls are over with.
