Mitt Romney surged to his largest opinion poll lead yet in the presidential race on Friday, two days after President Barack Obama came out in favor of gay marriage.
The GOP challenger reached 50 percent support for the first time in the Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll. That put him ahead of Obama among likely voters by seven percentage points.
The poll, released on Friday, showed a three-point swing to Romney from the previous day, when Romney had a four-point edge over the president in a head-to-head contest.
Rasmussen’s daily poll is an aggregate of questions asked over three days.
Friday’s covered respondents’ answers on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. As Obama’s same-sex statement was only released on Wednesday afternoon, the results suggest Romney’s lead could grow even larger in the next couple of days.
Rasmussen attributed the growing shift towards Romney to more than just the gay marriage issue. “It comes a week after a disappointing jobs report that raised new questions about the state of the economy,” the company said as it released the results.
Romney has been leading in both Rasmussen’s daily poll and another tracking poll run by Gallup for around a week, Gallup’s was standing at three points, 47 percent to 44 percent on Thursday. However other polls, not done on a daily basis, have mainly given the edge to Obama.
The Rasmussen poll moved the RealClearPolitics average of all polls conducted over the past two weeks to a single percentage point lead for Obama, proving how close the race has become.
Obama announced his support for gay marriage in an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts. It came after both vice president Joe Biden and education secretary Arne Duncan announced they too were in favor earlier in the week.
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