Well, scratch West Virginia from the swing state list for the time being. Both Public Policy Polling and Mason-Dixon
have new polling out in the state, and they give John McCain leads of 8
and 6 points respectively. It's possible that this is one of those
areas where McCain's attacks on Barack Obama are having some resonance.
It's also possible that the state was never all that close to begin
with, and that the ARG
poll from two weeks ago that gave Obama a substantial lead was one of
those infamous ARG outliers. By no means is the state totally
unwinnable for Obama -- and I'd still like to see what, say, Research
2000 or Rasmussen or SurveyUSA have to say about it -- but in all
probability, it is pretty far from the tipping point.
Elsewhere around the country...
The
national tracking polls are actually in pretty good agreement with one
another, with IBD/TIPP, Research 2000, Gallup, and Hotline all settling
in the 5-7 point range. Zogby is the outlier at Obama +2.7, and that's
because Zogby has the odd practice of fixing his poll's party
identification weights based on what they were in the last presidential
election. In Zogby's world, then, it's still 2004, when there were
roughly as many Republicans as Democrats. Although Zogby's trendlines
may be worth looking at, his topline numbers are basically unusable.
John
McCain does get a good result in Ohio from Mason-Dixon, which has him
ahead 46-45. Mason-Dixon has had a mild Republican lean this cycle, and
so this result isn't necessarily incongrous with other polling that
gives Obama a small lead in the Buckeye State. Nevertheless, there is
an argument that the McCain people should take a gamble and not devote
a lot of resources to Ohio, which is currently running 2-3 points
behind Obama's national numbers. That's not to say that McCain will win
Ohio -- on the contrary, Obama remains the favorite -- but if the
national popular vote draws back to a rough tie, which is a
precondition for any McCain victory scenario, it would seem unlikely
that Ohio defies the trend.
Meanwhile, Obama remains ahead by
double digits in two polls of Minnesota, and in another poll of
Wisconsin. He now has in excess of a 90 percent chance of winning every
one of John Kerry's states.
--Nate Silver