Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama widened his lead over Republican presidential rival John McCain in two national polls and is maintaining an edge in two daily tracking polls with less than a month to go before the election.
An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found Obama supported by 49 percent of registered voters, a 6-point margin over McCain. Two weeks ago an NBC-Journal poll put Obama's lead at 2 points.
Obama led McCain 53 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. survey, up from a 4-point advantage for the Democrat in September. Obama's lead widened to 14 points, 56 percent to 42 percent, among registered voters.
He also is ahead by 8 points in a Gallup Inc. daily tracking poll of registered voters, the 10th straight day he's held a statistically significant lead in that survey. A Diageo-Hotline tracking poll showed Obama getting 47 percent to McCain's 41 percent.
A CBS News poll, however, showed the race tightening. The Oct. 3-5 survey of 875 registered voters gave Obama a 47 percent to 43 percent lead. The poll's margin of error was 3 percentage points. Obama led by 8 points, 49 percent to 41 percent, in a CBS survey taken Sept. 27-30.
All five polls were conducted after the first presidential debate and the vice presidential debate, and after Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed a $700 billion financial rescue plan designed to unlock credit markets and restore confidence in the banking system.
Bush's Record Low
Bush's record-low unpopularity is hurting McCain, said Keating Holland, CNN's polling director.
``Bush's approval rating is as low as Richard Nixon's was on the day he resigned, and a growing number of Americans think John McCain's policies will be similar to Bush's,'' Holland said. Twenty-four percent of respondents in the CNN poll said they approved of the job Bush is doing and 74 percent said they disapproved.
No matter which candidate they supported, 60 percent of likely voters surveyed by CNN said they expected Obama would win Nov. 4.
Half of the registered voters surveyed by CNN were asked if Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, was qualified to be president: 57 percent said she wasn't and 43 percent said she was. Among the half of registered voters who were asked if Senator Joe Biden of Delaware is qualified, 80 percent said yes and 18 percent said no.
Biden, Palin
The NBC-Journal poll found 74 percent of those questioned said Biden was qualified to step into the Oval Office while 41 percent said they believe Palin is qualified.
That survey also found that 50 percent of those questioned said Obama and Biden won their debates with the Republican candidates, compared with 29 percent who viewed McCain and Palin as the winners.
The CNN, Gallup and Diageo-Hotline polls were conducted Oct. 3-5. The NBC-Journal poll was conducted Oct. 4-5. CNN gave the margin of error for its poll of 919 registered voters as 3 percentage points and 3.5 percentage points for the subgroup of 694 likely voters. The margin for the NBC-Journal poll of 658 registered voters was plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
The tracking polls are a rolling average of results of each day's polling over the period. Gallup gives a margin or error of plus or minus 2 percentage points for its survey; The Diageo- Hotline poll has a 3.3 percentage point margin of error.
