In addition to Rasmussen’s tracking polls, which have shown McCain and Obama within 1% for the last six straight days, they also produce voter trust polls for each candidate on several issues.

Now, a good deal of these numbers are only available to those who pay for premium member status to the pollster, but the gist of the polls are released to the public- and display nothing but good news for McCain. The most recent set of data was taken August 2nd and 3rd- which showed McCain more trusted on 9 out of 15 issues. Prior to that, Obama had been more trusted on 7 out of 10 issues polled. The real meat of polls comes when looking at the trends on the issues. Every single issue that was surveyed in both polls shows McCain either gaining ground, improving his lead, or overtaking obama’s lead. Without seeing the crosstabs, here is the best I could organize the data from the article.

A few of the highlights in terms of McCains +/-

Issue – July – August – Net Gain

• National Security +8 +12 +4
• • Economy -1 0 +1
• • Balance Budget 0 +3 +3
• • Immigration +3 +9 +6
• • Environment -14 -8 +6
• • Social Security-? +6 >+7
• • Health Care -12 -5 +7
• • Education -10 -4 +6
• • Iraq NA +12
• • Abortion NA +6
• • Energy NA +4
• • Negotiate Trade NA +9
• • Taxes NA +7

On Social Security, the article just mentions McCain previously being behind on Social Security, so I assume at least a -1.

I do wish I had the full crosstabs from the last few months, but with the numbers I could pick out, the trends have been rather incredible. Beyond just trends, the data shows that McCain is dominate on military, as expected. He has gained an over all edge on fiscal issues. And on the social issues that he hasn’t yet pulled ahead on, he is moving in the right direction.