This article is from the archive of our partner .
A respected pollster finds President Obama to be way more popular than he's been in other surveys, while Obamacare remains unpopular and Mitt Romney has a long way to go in Wisconsin. Here's our guide to today's polls and why they matter.
Findings: Obama is leading Romney among likely voters by 13 percentage points -- 53 percent to 40 percent.
Pollster: Bloomberg/ Selzer & Company
Methodology: Survey 1,002 adults, 734 of them likely voters, from June 15 to June 18. The margin of error is +/- 3.6 percentage points.
Why it matters: Conventional wisdom holds that the last month has been nothing but bad news for Obama -- the Wisconsin recall, the bad jobs report, etc. Well, the conventional wisdom still might not be wrong. This is a much larger lead for Obama than other recent polls have shown. His average lead is 2.2 percentage points, according to Real Clear Politics. That led many to quickly dismiss the poll as an outlier. "That's a clown poll, bro," The New York Times' Nate Silver tweeted. But The New Republic's Nate Cohn points out that Selzer & Co. is "an exceptionally well regarded pollster best known for conducting the famous Des Moines Register poll prior to the Iowa caucuses." The big difference in this result and other polls can't be blamed on improper weighting of age or race, he says, or partisan affiliation. "That suggests that either the likely voter screen yields a more Democratic electorate, which seems unlikely given higher GOP enthusiasm, or that Obama holds a surprisingly large advantage among voters who are 'totally independent,' a finding largely at odds with recent polling… Of course, even the best pollsters occasionally produce odd samples."