Democrats (including Democrats in the media) are unhappy the presidential race is within five points, so they're eager to find wider polling margins than that. Yahoo! readers saw this headline at the top of the news on Saturday morning: "Obama widens lead over McCain by 15 points in latest poll."
It was Reuters reporting on a Newsweek poll. As the reader should suspect, the poll questioned more Democrats than Republicans: 231 Republicans to 324 Democrats, plus 307 independents. But that wasn't in this web article, which began:
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has opened up a double-digit lead over Republican John McCain two weeks after he clinched the nomination, a new poll published on Friday showed.
The nationwide poll conducted by Newsweek showed Obama leading McCain by a margin of 51-36 percent, indicating that he might have got a bounce from his recent primary victory over Hillary Clinton.
Reuters did eventually notice the obvious: "Obama's edge in the latest poll is larger than in other recent surveys. A Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday found Obama had a only a 5-point lead." (I'd bet that wasn't at the top of the Yahoo! page.)
Newsweek's story on its own poll betrayed its delight that "finally" Obama was winning big, as Michael Hirsh began his web-exclusive article:
Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator wrested the nomination from Hillary Clinton. With numbers consistently showing rock-bottom approval ratings for President Bush and a large majority of Americans unhappy with the country's direction, the opposing-party candidate should, in the normal course, have attracted more disaffected voters. Now it looks as if Obama is doing just that.
As many conservatives have worried this election looks like 1996 -- formerly media-honored old war veteran is portrayed as bridge to last century, constantly portrayed as losing by double digits -- many liberals see 1992, the last time a forty-something JFK figure was making his national campaign debut:
The latest numbers on voter dissatisfaction suggest that Obama may enjoy more than one bounce. The new poll finds that only 14 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction of the country. That matches the previous low point on this measure recorded in June 1992, when a brief recession contributed to Bill Clinton's victory over Bush's father, incumbent George H.W. Bush.
At least Hirsh mentioned that the general-election campaign isn't exactly over yet:
[Pollster Larry] Hugick points out that in May 1988 when the primaries ended, Democrat Michael Dukakis enjoyed a 54 percent to 38 percent lead over George H.W. Bush. But Bush wound up winning handily.
Funny, that number did not make the Reuters story at all.