A new poll finds that a majority of people would prefer to watch a football game with Barack Obama but that they’d settle for John McCain.
People would rather watch a football game with Barack Obama than with John McCain — but by barely the length of a football. Obama was the pick over McCain by a narrow 50 percent to 47 percent, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll released Friday that generally mirrored each presidential candidate’s strengths and weaknesses with voters. Women, minorities, younger and unmarried people were likelier to prefer catching a game with Obama while men, whites, older and married people would rather watch with McCain.
Amazingly silly, yes, but these sort of questions are a good proxy for trust and likability. The football variant is unusual; one normally sees it as “have a beer with.” Like it or not, those kind of gut reactions are how most people chose political leaders.
What’s particularly noteworthy, though, isn’t Obama’s lead (it’s only barely outside the poll’s margin of error) but that both candidates are still viewed so favorably this late in a narrow, increasingly negative race.
RealClearPolitics has been tracking candidate favorability for months and both men have consistently had much higher favorables than unfavorables and been above the 50 percent mark. Indeed, both actually got more popular over the summer as people got to “know” them and they’ve both only fallen slightly from peaks around 60.
UPDATE: I misread the YahooNews headline and reversed the order in the original version of this. I’ve now corrected it in the headline and the text. The analysis remains the same, thankfully.
