Women, and Catholics, and Postgrads! Oh My!

The 2012 U.S. presidential election is looking to be a tight race so far. This means that certain key groups will likely decide whether President Barack Obama will win a second term or if Mitt Romney will take his place.

By surveying voters every day about their preferences for president and how likely they are to vote, Gallup is able to aggregate thousands of interviews together and look at the views of many different subgroups -- discerning which ones may matter the most and tracking their views over time. So, if you're following the blue and red road to the White House, you'll be excited to learn you can now download data on 47 specific voter subgroups on Gallup.com. Gallup will update the presidential preferences and voting certainty of each of these groups weekly, based on three-week rolling averages. We will post new data each Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. ET here -- http://www.gallup.com/poll/154577/Election-2012-Weekly-Demographic-Data.aspx.

Specific groups include:

• Gender
• Age
• Region
• Race
• Education
• Income level
• Party ID
• Ideology
• Religion
• Marital status
• Religiosity
• And more...

And, in early summer 2012, Gallup will provide an even more robust and interactive way for you to explore subgroup data and a whole lot more, so stay tuned to The Queue for more exciting election announcements.

More Data on Who Favors and Who Opposes Same-Sex Marriage

Guest post by Alyssa Brown

Since Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan publicly declared their support for legalizing same-sex marriage, our phones have been ringing off the hook with requests for more data on Americans' views on this topic. Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport reports that half of Americans believe same-sex marriages should be recognized by law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages. He also discusses how Americans' views on same-sex marriage have changed over time and vary by party identification, religion, and religiosity.

Here is an in-depth breakdown of how Americans feel about legalizing same-sex marriage, from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 3-6.

Frank Newport and USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page discuss Joe Biden's comments on same-sex marriage and President Obama's views on the issue in this week's Election Matters. We will be publishing more data on same-sex relations from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll in the coming weeks.

To stay up-to-date on this issue, be sure to sign up for Gallup News alerts and to receive our blogs via email.

Tracking Unemployment -- and "Good Jobs" -- Worldwide

Only Gallup collects employment data worldwide using the same methodology in every country so the results can be fairly and accurately compared.

We're out with our 2011 results today, revealing that 8% of the world's workforce was unemployed in 2011.  You can see results for all 148 countries in our global employment interactive.

The interactive also includes data for Gallup's measures of underemployment -- which adds the percentage of workers who are working part time but seeking full-time work to the percentage who are unemployed. This percentage was 17% worldwide in 2011. 

Gallup also reports on the percentage of workers who are employed full time for employer -- 42% in 2011.   It is this measure -- not unemployment or underemployment -- that is highly correlated with GDP per capita and wellbeing.

That's why Gallup calls this metric its measure of "good jobs." It is these types of stable jobs in the formal economy that help societies to grow and individuals to thrive. We think it's important for leaders to track and actively work to improve the percentage of workers employed full time for an employer, rather than just trying to lower unemployment rates. 

As Gallup's CEO states in his book, The Coming Jobs War, "The leadership problem is that an increasing number of people in the world are miserable, hopeless, suffering, and becoming dangerously unhappy because they don't have an almighty good job -- and in most cases, no hope of getting one."

Gallup's employment measures provide a way for leaders worldwide to track their progress creating these important good jobs. We invite you to explore and share Gallup's global employment data, to see which nations need these good jobs the most.

For complete data sets or custom research from the more than 150 countries Gallup continually surveys, please contact SocialandEconomicAnalysis@gallup.com or call 202.715.3030.

Gallup Daily Tracking Switches From GOP Race to General Election

With the news that Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign, Gallup will immediately begin daily tracking of the race between likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama in lieu of daily tracking of Republican nomination preferences.

Gallup will release its final report on the GOP nomination race Wednesday morning, based on the final standings as of today. In the final five-day rolling average, based on interviews conducted April 4-9 (no interviews were conducted Sunday, April 8, Republican registered voters significantly favored Romney (42%) over Santorum (24%), Gingrich (10%), and Paul (10%).

Gallup will begin daily tracking of the presumed general election race between Romney and Obama on Wednesday night. Daily results reporting based on five-day rolling averages will begin on Monday at 1 p.m. based on the first five days of data.

As always, you can track all of Gallup's Election 2012 coverage, including our daily tracking data, on our Election page, as well as via our mobile apps. To make sure you get every Gallup News election story as soon as it is published, sign up for our news alerts and select "All Gallup Headlines" or "Election 2012."

More Data on the Women's Vote

We've been flooded with requests for data on the women's vote since Susan Page of USA Today reported on women's shift toward Obama over Romney in the latest round of USA Today/Gallup swing-states polling.

Reporting on Obama's 51% to 42% lead over Republican front-runner Mitt Romney among registered voters in 12 key battleground states, Page revealed, "The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney's support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%."

Here are the raw numbers our readers have been asking for, from our USA Today/Gallup polling conducted in late March:

Additionally, here is the trend data for each of the women's groups:

Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport and USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page discuss possible causes and implications of these data in this week's Election Matters.

Newport will also post more analysis on the women's vote in his blog "Polling Matters" later this week.

Additionally, you can track how the Republican candidates are doing by gender and among key subgroups and much more on our Election 2012 page.

To stay up to date, be sure to sign up for Gallup News alerts and to receive our blogs via email.