Polls show Obama has significant lead

Different responses to the crisis
And two-thirds of respondents said that the highest-profile action Mr. McCain made in response to the crisis — announcing he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington and help negotiators strike a deal — made no difference in the outcome of the talks.

The CBS News poll suggested one sharp contrast in the view of voters of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain that might have been fed by the different ways the two men responded to the crisis. Forty-five percent said Mr. McCain acted too quickly when he made a decision, compared with 29 percent who said he did not act quickly enough. For Mr. Obama, 23 percent said he acted too quickly, compared with 41 percent who said he did not act quickly enough.

The national poll findings by CBS News were echoed in polls released Tuesday by Time Magazine and the Pew Research Center. Perhaps more problematic for Mr. McCain were polls, also taken after the debate and in the midst of the financial crisis, suggesting problems for him in critical states, including Florida and Ohio, which President Bush won in 2004 and which Mr. McCain had been confident of holding, and Pennsylvania, a state that Democrats won last time and that Mr. McCain has put on the top of the list of states he has been trying to win. Complete results for all the polls are at nytimes.com/politics.

Polls by Quinnipiac University, taken Sept. 27 through Sept. 29, showed Mr. Obama ahead in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Time/CNN battleground polls also showed Mr. Obama with a lead in Minnesota and Virginia, a state that has been on the top of the pickup lists for Mr. Obama.

The CBS News national survey suggested a toxic atmosphere for incumbents in general, but particularly for Republicans. The approval rating for Congress is down to 15 percent, another historic low for the Times/CBS News poll.

High economic anxiety
The CBS News poll found economic anxiety among Americans as high as it has ever been in the history of the poll. Nine in 10 Americans said the economy was in very bad or fairly bad shape; the highest measure on that score since The Times and CBS News began asking the question in September 1986. (The percentage who said that the economy was in very good shape was less than 1 percent.) And the number of Americans who thought the economy was getting worse, 76 percent, set another record; the gloomiest Americans have been since the question was first asked in April 1974.

The CBS News poll of 1,257 adults, including 1,113 registered voters, was conducted Saturday through Tuesday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The polling comes on the eve of the vice-presidential debate between Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, a Republican, and Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and provides new evidence that Ms. Palin’s standing among voters has declined since Mr. McCain chose her as his running mate in August.

The Pew poll found that 51 percent of respondents said she was not qualified to be president, compared with 37 percent who said she was. That is a reversal from early last month, when 52 percent of respondents said Ms. Palin was qualified to be president.

This article, Poll shows Obama Gaining Support and McCain Weakened in Bailout Crisis, first appeared in The New York Times.

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