Obama Lead Drops to 3 Points

Following up on an earlier post about a CBS News poll showing Barack Obama's lead over John McCain dropping to 4 points, Reuters ran a story today citing a Reuters / C-SPAN / Zogby that shows the Illinois Senator's lead has dropped to 3 points in national polling.

Now, I'll say what I said before. National polls mean little except for long term trends. The race for the presidency is a state by state contest. Most states are already decided. Some states are firmly in the Republican camp and others are firmly in the Democratic camp. And then there are the battle grounds. Real Clear Politics averages yesterday revealed that in the battleground states, the presidential race was very close, with most states in the margin of error range. All indicators point to the idea that this election, just like the last two, will be very close.

Given the caveat about national polling, it's still interesting to look at the results, keeping in mind that this poll is but one snapshot in time and cannot be considered a reliable indicator of how election day will go.

According to the poll results, Obama has a slight edge on McCain in national surveying, 48 percent to 45 percent. Reuters says the poll has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points, which means national polling essentially shows a dead heat. Four percent of respondents said they were undecided. That's lower than the 8 to 9 percent I've seen in some other places, and significantly lower than the 20 percent in the CBS News poll.

Reuters / C-SPAN / Zogby will run this poll every day from now through election day. Pollster John Zogby is quoted in the story as saying, "Obama is leading among the key target groups, but this race is nowhere close to over. The deal is far from closed."

The poll was taken after the vice presidential debate between Joe Bide and Sarah Palin. Future polls will drop the oldest data and add the newest data for a three day period in an attempt to pick up on trends.