Tracking polls update, 10/6 (click to enlarge)

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The daily tracking polls haven’t shown a great deal of movement over the past three days. As you can see (at least if you click the graph and look at it in original size), the Research 2000/Kos poll is still off on its own, measuring a 12-point blowout lead for Obama/Biden today, but it’s been stable. The three other daily tracking polls are roughly in agreement: Gallup and Rasmussen have an 8-point Obama lead, the Hotline poll a slightly smaller 6-point lead. That’s all roughly the same as the last three days, when all those three polls had the lead at 6-8 point too.

On the other hand, this stability in the daily polls does confirm the slight move that I signaled in the last polling update three days ago. I wrote then that “after five days of similar numbers,” with an average Obama lead of 6.3-7% on each, there was “a hint of new upward movement”, with the average lead moving up to 7.8%. Well, the Democratic ticket has kept that extra point and another extra half: the average Obama lead has been 8.3-8.5% since.

This seems to have become something of a pattern in the past month or so. Obama moves up a couple of points, stabilises at the new level for a few days, then moves up a couple of points again.

The Research 2000/Kos poll, which has had the largest or shared largest Obama lead in all but 3 of its 26 days of existence so far, is becoming a bit of a distraction. It’s not entirely easy to take a poll at face value that so consistently diverges from the others, especially if it’s a poll commissioned by the Daily Kos and it’s diverging in favour of Obama. But even without taking the R2000/Kos poll into account, today’s numbers are very good for Obama.

Counting Gallup, Rasmussen and the Hotline poll, Obama has an average 7.3% lead – the single largest since his best day during the DNC, on 2 September. Counting just Gallup and Rasmussen (the Hotline poll only became a daily poll from 11 September on), Obama has an average 8% lead – larger than he even ever had during the DNC.

Nevertheless, stability’s the word for now – maybe until tomorrow’s debate makes an impact. But only on the level of the daily tracking polls. There’s lots more going on in the state polls. And it’s all terrific news for Obama. Downticket polls provide additional good news for the Democrats.

In lieu of a proper update on those numbers, however, I’m just going to link to today’s update at Campaigndiaries.com. It does an excellent job illustrating the width and depth of the change manifesting itself in the polls right now. Makes for quite an exciting read – in as far as a polling update can be exciting, of course…