Today's Polls, 7/14

So, because my hotel didn't have my room ready yet once I got in from LGA -- and because I really needed a haircut -- I decided to get a haircut. Having chosen the marginally swankier Korean-run salon over the Italian barber shop, I was treated to a bottled water and .... a hot-off-the-presses copy of the New Yorker. If you're in search of some karmatic equity, however, the Gray's Papaya down the block had a huge Barack Obama sign taking up about half its window space.

In Michigan, Rasmussen has Barack Obama moving into an 8-point lead. Obama had led by 3 points in Rasmussen's June poll, although other pollsters had shown numbers closer to the 8-point lead that Rasmussen found today.It does not surprise me that Obama had a little bit of oopmh in his Michigan numbers, even if his performance elsewhere has been tepid. The fact that Obama did not campiagn there -- and had no field offices set up, etc. -- while McCain had done so fairly vigorously, was surely affecting the numbers. But we're now far enough removed from that period that the state is regressing back to its underlying demographic reality, and particularly its high unemployment rate.

Michigan may be moving further from the Ohio end of the spectrum and closer to the Pennsylvania end of the spectrum. That's a very important development because there are quite a few ways that Obama could win the White House while losing Ohio only, but many fewer if both Ohio and Michigan were lost. Of note: we now attribute Obama with about a 4.5 percent chance of winning the election while having lost the popular vote.

McCain has improved his standing in two other states, however. In Louisiana, Rasmussen now has him with a 19-point lead, up from 9 points in late May. Although it's a little difficult to tell what's going on the the South (polls in states like Alabama have recently moved toward Obama), it is fair to classify Louisiana as "safe McCain".

And here in New York, Siena has a new poll showing Obama with a 13-point lead; he had led by 18 points in June. What's interesting is that there was no real deterioration in Obama's favorability numbers in the state, whereas McCain's improved a good bit.

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Today's Polls, 7/1

Tom Schaller argues in the New York Times that Barack Obama should abandon the South, or at least the South outside of Florida and Virginia. I don't agree with the entirety of Schaller's reasoning. In particular, while I see the same inverse correlation that Schaller does -- the greater the number of black voters in a Southern state, the fewer white voters tend to vote for the Democrat -- I don't necessarily see a causation. Our regression model seems to do a pretty good job of explaining the Southern vote without any reference to some sort of racial interaction effects, by focusing instead on things like the number of white evangelicals in the state and income levels.

Nevertheless, I do tend to agree with Schaller's conclusion: the South (again excluding Florida and Virginia) is fairly likely to disappoint the Democrats again. We have a number of polls today to back that up.



Let's focus first on the results in Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. Obama did get a bounce from Strategic Vision's last poll of Georgia, where he had previously trailed by 14 points. But he remains 8 points behind, and while Bob Barr is pulling 3 percent of the vote away from McCain in Georgia, it doesn't appear to me that Barr will have the resources to improve that number significantly. In North Carolina, Obama has been stuck at 3-5 points behind John McCain for quite a long time; the PPP poll today confirms that conclusion. And in Louisiana, Southern Media & Opinion Research has Obama 16 points behind, just as it did in April.

It seems to me that Obama's numbers in states like North Carolina and Georgia are liable to come in within a relatively narrow range. He'll do better than a Democrat like John Kerry did there, with substantial support from blacks (although Schaller is right that African-American turnout has not been particularly low), students, information-sector workers, and new migrants to the region -- as PPP notes, Obama is leading by 6 points among people who have moved to North Carolina from outside the state, but trails by 13 among people who were born and raised there. But where Obama is disliked in the South, he tends to be disliked a lot; his "very unfavorables" tend to be pretty high in the region. There just aren't that many swing voters in the South, and the Democrats are left watching the paint dry and the demographics gradually become more favorable to them in states like North Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina could be 2012's Virginia, and Georgia could be 2016's, but it's probably too soon for a non-Southern Democrat to be winning states in the interior of the region.

Florida, however, remains its own demographic entity, and there an Obama win is more plausible. PPP has him leading by 2 there -- a big move upward from their only previous poll of the state, which had Obama 11 points behind in March -- although Strategic Vision has him trailing by 6. The fact is that Florida remains something like Obama's Plan C or Plan D for winning the election, but any state with 27 electoral votes and where the polling appears to be this volatile will need to be closely monitored.

And once we move entirely outside of the South, Obama appears to be doing quite well. SurveyUSA now has him 20 points ahead in New York -- up from 10 points before -- and he's holding onto a 5-point advantage in both major national tracking polls. From everything we can tell, Obama's post-primary bounce has plateaued, but not peaked, though it does appear to be concentrated in particular regions, some of which (like the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Michigan) have been quite helpful to Obama, and others of which (like New York and California) are fairly superfluous.

Finally, one quick methodological aside: the Strategic Vision polls were "leaked" today by Political Wire with a limited number of details. I have filled in my guesstimates of survey dates and sample sizes based on their typical patterns, but we will correct those tomorrow as needed.

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Today's Polls, 6/1

It's going to be a busy day, so let's get some housekeeping out of the way first.

Firstly, I was invited to write a guest column today in the New York Post, which you can find here:

It was a Sunday evening, two days before the 2004 presidential election, and Vice President Dick Cheney was aboard Air Force Two, on his way to Hawaii.

What was Cheney doing 30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean instead of attending to some swing state like Ohio or Florida? Days before, a poll had come out in the Honolulu Advertiser showing Bush-Cheney tied with Kerry-Edwards in the state, at 43 percent of the vote each. This was considered a surprise; Al Gore had carried Hawaii by 18 points. But it was the first Hawaii poll to come out in months, and Cheney decided to gamble some of his limited time on the state's four electoral votes.

It proved not to be worth the jet fuel - Kerry won Hawaii by a 9-point margin. But it was nevertheless a watershed moment in the history of polling. Instead of the campaign dictating polling, the polls were now dictating campaign strategy.

Secondly, you're going to be seeing contributions from a new, very talented blogger, and I've also got a guest feature to roll out from one of my colleagues at Baseball Prospectus -- more on this in the coming days.

But now, onto the polls. Three of them out today, and they all tend to confirm our existing impressions of their respective states. Rasmussen has John McCain 9 points ahead of Barack Obama (and 7 points ahead of Hillary Clinton) in Louisiana. That's just slightly stronger than Obama has performed in other Louisiana polls, but probably outside the range where it can be considered competitive in any way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Rasmussen has Obama ahead by 13 and Clinton ahead by 30. Massachusetts has at times been a frustrating state for Obama, first when he lost it badly in the primaries and then when some earlier polling had come out showing it to be potentially competitive. But at the end of the day the Democrats' party ID advantage is too overwhelming in Massachusetts to give McCain much of a chance.

Finally, in Nebraska, SurveyUSA has McCain 12 points ahead. However, the poll also shows the race tied in NE-1, meaning that Obama could potentially pick up an electoral vote from that district. We had initially thought that NE-2, which consists mostly of Omaha, might be Obama's better opportunity to pick up an electoral vote in Nebraska. But NE-1 includes the college town of Lincoln, and also shares a long border with Iowa, where Obama is very well liked. Both NE-1 and NE-2 are worth keeping an eye on.

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Today's Polls, 4/15

Our tax day collection features an eccentric array of polls.

Strategic Vision is out with its weekly poll of Pennsylvania. In general election trial heats, McCain leads Hillary Clinton by 3 points and Barack Obama by 10. Strategic Vision has consistently shown a pretty strong house effect, with both Democrats performing notably worse in its surveys than in other polls of the state. With that said, Obama has lost 3 points against McCain, and Clinton 6, from its poll last week. As this is the most recent poll of the state, it's possible that the Democrats' squabbling is having an effect on their general election prospects.

By the way, the way that our polling weightings are now designed -- and I still need to explain this more thoroughly -- the model recognizes that there are diminishing returns from any one pollster. So even though Strategic Vision is surveying 1,200 Pennsylvania general election voters each week -- that's 4,800 since it began surveying the state last month - the model says "OK, we've got an awful lot of Strategic Vision in here; I'm not sure how much more we can learn from it", and discounts its previous results relatively heavily.

Polls for Louisiana, and North and South Dakota, are below the break.

The McGovern Center at Dakota Weslayan University has twin polls out in North and South Dakota. In North Dakota, McCain leads Obama by 6 points, but Hillary by 20. In South Dakota, he leads Obama by 17, and Clinton by 29. I don't know what it is about the Dakotas, but the SurveyUSA polls also showed Obama being much more competitive in NoDa than SoDa. With that said, these results need to be treated with much caution, as the sample sizes are tiny (only about 260 voters in each state), and the poll is somewhat out of date. DWU also polled the South Dakota Democratic primary, and showed Obama leading Clinton 46-34; the same sample size caution applies in interpreting that result.

Finally, a Louisiana poll by Southern Media and Opinion Research -- which I've given the acronym SMOR(e) -- shows Clinton reasonably competitive against McCain, down by 7 points, whereas Obama trails him by 16. This contrasts with last week's Rasmussen poll of that state, which showed Obama faring better. Either way, however, Louisiana is nowhere near a swing state, with both Democrats having win probabilities in the low single digits.

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Today's Polls, 4/11

The headliner today is a Rasmussen Reports survey of Pennsylvania, which contains good news for both Democrats in the Keystone, with Hillary Clinton leading John McCain by 9 points and Barack Obama leading him by 8. Clinton's numbers have consistently been pretty good in Pennsylvania -- she's been ahead in the last four polls by margins ranging from 3 points to 9 -- whereas Obama's have been all over the board. But this could potentially be a sign that Obama's general election numbers tend to improve in states where he runs an active primary campaign. It will be interesting to see whether there is any similar effect for the Democrats in Indiana and North Carolina.

Rasmussen also surveyed Louisiana: Obama trails McCain by 11 there, and Hillary by 22. This is something of a reversal from the numbers we usually see in the Deep South, where Clinton has generally outpolled Obama. One thing to watch for is that polls in non-competitive states can affect our regression equations as much as polls taken anywhere else, so Clinton for instance has taken a hit to her West Virginia numbers as a result of this survey, which has some commonalities with Louisiana in terms of education levels and religiosity.

Finally (and speaking of non-competitive states): in Arizona, McCain has a 22-point lead over both Democrats according to a Northern Arizona University poll.

ALSO, eagle-eyed observers will note that Minnesota has been moved from the Prairie region to the Great Lakes reason, which affects nothing but aesthetics, but it felt weird not having the Land of 10,000 Lakes grouped with its Great Lakes brethren.

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