WNBC/Marist: New York a Swing State?

The Swamp cites a WNBC/Marist poll that shows McCain highly competitive with both Democrats in the Empire State. In fact, he is leading Barack Obama by 2 points, while Hillary Clinton leads McCain by the same small margin.

We try and keep an open mind here, but ... I'm going to go ahead and call this one an outlier. For one thing, Marist has a below-average pollster rating. For another, this survey asked another question about a McCain-Condi Rice versus Clinton-Obama and Obama-Clinton tickets. If the Condi question was asked before the regular Presidential trial heat questions, that could influence perceptions of the latter -- a classic case of question order biasing the results.