The survey, conducted by Ed Reilly and Jeremy Ruch of FTI Communications, a communications and strategic consulting firm, surveyed 1,055 likely voters by landline and cell phone from Sept. 15-19. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Full results from the survey, including a detailed look at Americans’ attitudes about opportunity and upward mobility, will be released in the Sept. 22 National Journal.
50% Obama
43% Romney
Obama’s approval rating in the new survey also ticked up to 50 percent, with 46 percent disapproving.
Those gains are critical, because as always with an incumbent president, attitudes toward Obama’s performance powerfully shape the race. Among likely voters who approve of Obama’s job performance, he leads Romney in the ballot test by 93 percent to 3 percent; those who disapprove prefer Romney by 87 percent to 5 percent.
On both fronts, the survey shows the president almost exactly hitting that mark. He leads Romney among all nonwhite voters by 78 percent to 18 percent, drawing over nine in 10 African-Americans and slightly more than the two-thirds of Hispanics he carried last time.
Among whites, Obama wins 41 percent compared to Romney’s 51 percent. Obama’s showing is down slightly from the 43 percent among whites he attracted in 2008 but still enough for the president to prevail in both sides’ calculations. With more whites than non-whites either undecided or saying they intend to support another candidate, Romney is not nearly approaching the roughly three-in-five support among them he’ll likely need to win.
The survey identifies 73 percent of likely voters as white, down from 74 percent in 2008; the remaining 27 percent were either nonwhite or refused to identify their race. In a close race, even such tiny shifts in the share of the vote cast by whites and nonwhites could prove decisive.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/heartland-monitor-poll-obama-leads-50-percent-to-43-percent-20120921
