Playing a bit of catch-up from yesterday.
While Obama's lead in the
national tracking polls has collapsed, the state polling continues to
show largely flat trendlines.
Certainly, if his tracking polls don't begin to recover soon, it is going to begin to exert some significant downward pressure on his numbers. But, the tracking polls are not the end-all, be-all. Our model did not buy that Obama had opened up an 8- or 9-point lead after his Berlin speech, as the tracking polls had shown for a day or two, and it doesn't buy that McCain has drawn the race to a tie now.
Otherwise, most of these polls are pretty dill, but it's a good result for McCain in Missouri -- note the particularly large sample size in the new SurveyUSA poll -- which seems decreasingly likely to be the state that swings the election.
--Nate Silver