Obama up by four points with likely voters: Introducing the Esquire/Yahoo! News poll

Who better understands American families, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? Who would you rather lead us into war? Who’s a bigger liar? Are voters suspicious of Mormonism? And which candidate would win in a fistfight?

Yahoo! News and Esquire teamed up to commission pollster Gary Langer of Langer Research Associates to survey more than a thousand Americans about those topics (and many more) in the days following the political conventions. We asked questions most pollsters don’t—on religion, race, personal values, class, and personality—as well as the usual ones about voter preference. We will report our findings over the next few weeks, and the complete survey will be available on Yahoo! News, in the November issue of Esquire, and on Esquire.com's The Politics Blog.

This week, we begin with the basics:

Obama is up by 4 among likely voters.
Obama is up by 4 among likely voters.

When we cross-tabulate those results with demographic information, we see familiar divides.

Those in the highest income brackets favor Romney.
Those in the highest income brackets favor Romney.


The numbers change, though, when we ask all Americans to predict who they think is going to win:

57 percent would bet on Obama to win.
57 percent would bet on Obama to win.

Or, in a scenario straight from Ann Coulter’s imagination:

Obama would easily win a fistfight.
Obama would easily win a fistfight.


Click here for the full results of these survey questions, and check back next week for the latest findings.

METHODOLOGY

This Esquire/Yahoo! News Poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone Sept. 7-10, 2012, among a random national sample of 1,002 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for the full sample, 4.5 points for registered voters and 5 points for likely voters. The survey was produced for Esquire/Yahoo! News by Langer Research Associates, with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Interviewing Service of America of Van Nuys, CA