An odd day of polling, but one attention-grabbing result dominates the rest. That is from Ohio, where Public Policy Polling
has Barack Obama ahead by 11 points. While Public Policy Polling
developed a reputation as being somewhat Obama-friendly in the
primaries, its track record is fairly strong,
and its prior Ohio poll -- taken way back in March -- had shown McCain
ahead by 8 points. As Ohio is probably the single most important state
in this election (it's by no means the only
important state, but it's pretty darned important), this result is
enough to drive Obama past the 67 percent threshold in our overall projection; we presently have him as about a 2:1 favorite to
win the election.
In Minnesota, however, SurveyUSA
has Obama with just a 1-point lead over McCain. SurveyUSA's methodology
takes a more fluid view of party identification, and so it tends to
produce results that can be more encouraging for the non-dominant party
in a particular state. Its most recent previous Minnesota poll, taken
back in May, had shown Obama ahead by 6 points.
In North Carolina, Civitas
has John McCain ahead by 4 points -- down a tick from the 5-point lead
he held a month ago. Obama has yet to show a lead in North Carolina,
but has trailed by somewhere between 2 and 4 points in the three most
recent polls of the state.
There is also a SurveyUSA poll out in Kentucky
that shows Obama trailing by 12 points. This poll made it across our
wires too late to be included in our metrics, but it speaks to the
extent that Obama is starting to improve his numbers among lapsed,
Clinton-leaning Democrats, particularly in Appalachia. Obama had
trailed by 24 points in Survey USA's May poll of Kentucky, and by as
many as 36 points previously.
There are also a series of national polls out,
all of which have consolidated in the area of Obama +4, exactly the
popular vote margin that we attribute to him based on the
state-by-state polling results.
So what to make of the meme that Obama's numbers haven't been bouncing?
The only way that you can come to that conclusion is if you cherrypick
results: fixating on today's Minnesota result, for instance, while ignoring Ohio and Kentucky, or looking only at national polls, while ignoring the information we can divine from polls released in dozens of individual states. Our methodology extracts an average bounce
of about 4 between all national and state polls released since Clinton conceded the primary. Four points is not so large that some
individual polls won't show a
bounce, particularly if the bounce is concentrated in particular states
and regions. But bounce Obama has, and the longer Republicans remain in
denial about it, the less time they'll have to catch up.
--Nate Silver