The first poll with McCain ahead by 5% last week got a lot of press, but here’s one with more interesting results…

One intriguing result from Sunday’s Washington Post/ABC poll (which showed Barack Obama maintaining a narrow, 4 percent lead among likely voters) was the Democratic candidate’s vault over John McCain on the question of leadership.

For the first time all spring and summer, when voters answered the question “Who is the stronger leader?” Obama beat his Republican foe.

The reversal is pretty dramatic. In March, those surveyed chose McCain as the stronger leader by a 53-40 margin. In June, McCain had a 47-44 lead. But in the August poll, Obama beats McCain by five points, 49-44. That is an 18-point switch in four months.

And later on (I just need to point this out)…

According to the Post/ABC poll, 64 percent of those surveyed think Obama is addressing the issues, and 29 percent believe he is intent on attacking McCain. The voters had a quite different picture of McCain, however, with 48 percent saying the Republican was primarily interested in attacking Obama and just 45 percent saying that McCain was addressing their concerns.

The Post/ABC survey ratified the results of the Battleground Poll, a survey taken by a bipartisan team of pollsters, which was released earlier this month. When asked who was waging the more negative campaign, respondents in the Battleground survey chose McCain over Obama by 50 to 21 percent. Today’s CNN-Gallup poll had a similar result, with nearly half of those polled saying McCain had attacked Obama unfairly.
…
As McCain said after surviving Romney’s televised assaults in the Republican primary season, “Negative campaigns don’t work.”

We’ll have to wait for additional polls that reinforce these results, but there certainly are drawbacks to running a negative campaign, and McCain may be beginning to feel them. In the meantime, the Democratic (and later, Republican) National Convention(s) will throw all of the polling for a loop.

A little over two months to go. Oh boy!