Gallup gets way more attention than any other pollster

If you're a Obama supporter this is bad news because Gallup has shown a solid Romney lead for more than a week (today's tracking survey has the president behind by 6 points). The other national polls - all of which receive far less notice - show the race to be tighter, with Romney holding a slight lead. From the NYT's Nate Silver:

On Sunday afternoon, I looked up how often each tracking poll had been cited in the Lexis-Nexis news database over the course of the past week. (The criterion I used for this search was to look for instances in which the pollster's name appeared within 25 words of the term "tracking" and also either of the terms "poll" or "survey.") It turns out that the Gallup national tracking poll was cited in the news media more often than the other six national tracking polls combined. Although the national tracking polls show, on average, a race that is about tied, they would have conveyed the impression of a four-point lead for Mr. Romney if weighted based on how often they were cited in news accounts.

Gallup's brand awareness helps explain the coverage (despite its decidedly mixed record in recent years), as does the fact that a large Romney lead makes the election more compelling. That said, Gallup doesn't seem as much of an outlier as it did last week; other national polls show the race to be extremely close, and at Intrade, the online trading market, Obama's chances have been slipping in recent days. They now stand at 60.6 percent. With or without Gallup, Romney has gained momentum.