If you're jumping out of your seat with every vibration and
high-pitched noise, waiting for Barack Obama's VP announcement to hit
your cellphone, there is not really a whole lot to entertain and
distract you in today's polls.
In Illinois, home of the 2008 World Champion Chicago Cubs, Barack Obama leads by 15 in the latest poll from Rasmussen.
The only other time that Rasmussen had polled Illinois was in early
July, at which point Obama led by 11. This, then, is a nominal
improvement for Obama -- but since an 11-point margin seemed
implausibly small before, this may be more reversion to the mean than
any real sort of trendline.
Rasmussen also surveyed Georgia,
where John McCain leads by 9. This is slightly better than Obama has
fared in any prior Rasmussen poll of Georgia. But the more noteworthy
characteristic is that polling in what we call the South Coast region
-- states like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia -- has trended
within a remarkably narrow range. With the exception of a couple of
oddball InsiderAdvantage polls, and Zogby Interactive's exercise in
dart-throwing, all nine polls of Georgia in our database have shown
McCain's lead in the range of 8 to 14 points. As we have expressed
before, there may simply not be all that many swing voters in this
region. Once you count white evangelicals, the overwhelming majority of
whom will vote for McCain, and African-American voters, the
overwhelming majority of whom will vote for Obama, there isn't all that
much of the electorate left to divvy up.
Lastly, in New York, Siena
has Barack Obama ahead by 8, a decline from 13 points last month. I
would not read too much to this one, but it may indicate that the
polling continues to be volatile in states with a large number of
Hillary Clinton supporters.
--Nate Silver