Bloomberg News keeps the good news coming for Barack Obama. Its most recent poll shows Obama opening up a significant 13 point lead over Mitt Romney, Obama's largest lead since the antediluvian era known as the Maverick Age.

Yes, you should view these numbers skeptically. Bloomberg's outsized numbers have outlier written all over them. Just yesterday, Gallup had Obama at 45 and Romney at 46; even given that Gallup leans right, that's still a huge disparity between polls released one day apart.

[Eternal poll disclaimer: national polls are largely meaningless, margin of error, all politics is localish, etc.]

For all that, there's little in Bloomberg's breakdown data that outright accounts for the skew. The poll had a 38/33 Democrat/Republican advantage, with 29% independents. Republicans will jump and down on Twitter and yell that the country is actually considerably more conservative than that. But Bloomberg's poll is of likely voters, and in the last presidential election the electorate was +7 Democrat, so they'll argue that their sample is indicative of those who actually go to the polls. (Someone should really tell them about 2010.) Bloomberg was also quick to note that their +5 Dem lean is actually lower than recent WaPo and WSJ polls. The gender and race breakdowns were also in line with contemporary polls.

But, if we were to be super-duper conservative (not in the political sense), we could cut five points from Bloomberg's total and give it to Romney. That gives Obama a 48-45 lead, just within the 3.7% margin of error, which is much more in line with other polls.

Now for the fun, down-question stuff. Obama has an overall positive approval rating, but his numbers on the economy and the budget were stinky. So where's the aggregate positive approval rating come from? You look at table now:

                                                    Approve            Disapprove       Not Sure
As president                                    53                        44                    3
With the economy                           43                        53                    4
With the budget deficit                    32                         60                    8
With creating jobs                           46                         48                    6
With the relationship with Iran        41                         41                   18
With terrorism                                65                         27                    8
With policies on trade with China     32                         40                  28

I'll give you PoliticOlogy's entire yearly budget if you said on January 20, 2009 that the only issue on which Obama would have net positive ratings at the end of his first term would be fighting terrorism. (Fun fact: all 27% of that disapproval on Obama's handling of terrorism is Glenn Greenwald.)

So no one in Bloomberg's poll is really enamored of Obama. "Obama is the lesser of two evils," quoth one independent voter from Ohio. "He was basically handed a sick drug baby and expected to make a genius out of it overnight." I don't think that's making it into a campaign ad. Still, it's interesting to note that all the doom-and-gloom over job numbers recently hasn't yet to be felt at the polls. (Theory!)

Why is that, by the way? Because Bloomberg's crew was significantly less excited about one Mitt Awkwardstein Romney. Romney's mid-30s approval rating is exactly where it was one year ago, but his disapproval ratings gained significantly, not the movement he wanted to make after twelve months of campaigning. 55% of voters said Mitt Romney is out of touch with Americans (oops), only 34% want to see him on their TVs for the next four years, and only 31% would want to sit next to him on an airplane (free tip to Bloomberg: he takes different planes than us). The only issue on which Romney comes close to getting a plurality on Obama is the economy, on which Obama leads 48-43.

Even more interesting:

Which of the following would you say is the most important qualification in Mitt Romney’s resume? 

8      His leadership of the Olympics
41    His experience as governor of Massachusettes
34    His business experience with Bain Capital
11    None of these (VOL)
6      Not sure

Do you think Mitt Romney’s background as a private equity executive does or does not make him better prepared to create jobs as president?

45     Does make him better prepared
49     Does not make him better prepared
6       Not sure

Do you think it is a good idea or bad idea to elect a corporate CEO as president? 

44     Good idea
40     Bad idea
16     Not sure

Guh? Via Alexander Burns:

So according to the voters in this poll, it's a good idea to elect a CEO as president, but that kind of experience doesn't help create jobs. Not exactly the readout of an electorate that's firmly set in its view of Romney and his qualification.

Probably. This also seems proof that the way you ask a question makes all the difference. Clearly somme people heard the Romney private equity question and immediately computed private equity = bad, and some people heard the CEO question and computed CEO = good. Words!

Last, recent polls have shown immigration at the bottom of voters' priorities of issues, hovering at the 1-2% mark. It's 4% in Bloomberg's poll. That's too small a jump to be statistically significant—could just be noise, along with the other outlying numbers. But something big did just happen in immigration...

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Follow on Ology: Evan McMurry |  PoliticOlogy

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