Gallup Polls Coming a Litte Back in Line With Reality

     It has been remarked on a lot how Gallup is been such a major outlier over the last week. Whereas,, most polls showed a tight race either way, Gallup showed Romney up by as much as 7 points among likely voters and taking a 1 point lead among registered voters.

     Why this is has been debated. Of course, Fox's answer has been that the Gallup polls are the only accurate ones out there-Rasmussen is now the "most accurate" one out there as it's shown Romney leading by 4 points for the second straight day.

      One major question is just what methodology they are using in their likely voter polls. There seems little doubt that they've been interviewing a lot more Republicans lately-the designation "likely voter" is very fluid and changes from time to time based on enthusiasm.

      Actually I do remember that Gallup was the last major tracking poll to detect Romney's Denver bounce which suggests that because of their longer term method-which is a virtue-it may be slower to detect new moves.

       Anyway, I see today that the likely voter poll has finally tightened a little with Romney's lead falling to 50-47. This is good news as I hate going to Talking Points Memo these days after one only to read more bad news about Gallup.

       Obama has now taken a 1 point among registered voters-48 to 47. So this could bode well also, as since Denver the President has suffered from a Republican surge in voter enthusiasm in the polls. Today's numbers show the spread between likely and registered voters dropping to 4 points-still higher than we want to see, but better than the 6 points we were seeing a few days ago. We'll see if other polls start to show this tightening

       It's also of no small note that today Gallup also showed a major surge for the President's job approval number. He gained 3 points in approval and shaved two points off on disapproval so that's a net gain of 5 points today. He now shows a 53% approval rating with only 42% disapproving a fairly healthy number going into the election and actually much higher than he was until the DNC in Charlotte.