Poll: Obama Opens Up 9 Point Lead
MIAMI (CBSMiami) – On the heels of two national polls showing President Barack Obama has a seven-point lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, a new Fox News Poll increases the lead to a full nine points.
According to the Fox News Poll, in a head-to-head race, President Obama would receive 49 percent of the vote to Romney's 40 percent of the vote. Last month, Fox found that Obama had a four percentage point lead over Romney, 45-41.
Obama's lead is being built on the backs of independent voters who broke for Obama by 11 points. However, the Fox News poll found 30 percent of independents were still undecided, which is the highest number of undecided voters found in recent national polling.
The Fox News poll found a similar trend of registered voters not having a very favorable opinion of Romney. According to the poll, 54 percent had a favorable opinion of Obama to 42 percent unfavorable. For Romney, the favorable number was 46 to 45 percent unfavorable.
The poll found Americans are just about evenly split on the president's job approval with 49 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving, which was inside the poll's margin of error. Still, if Romney can't tilt that number a great deal, he's going to have trouble in November.
When pollsters ran down a series of issues, Obama led in all foreign policy categories, along with handling health care, taxes, same-sex marriage and helping people achieve the American dream. Romney led on the deficit and split with the president on improving the economy.
Out of all the polls run dating back to July 16, RealClearPolitics found an average lead of 6.7 points.
