Today's Polls, 7/18

Although it is more apparent in some polling than in others, there now unambiguously seems to have been some movement toward John McCain.

In Maine, Barack Obama now leads by 8 points according to the latest numbers from Rasmussen. While Maine is unlikely to be competitive, Obama had led by 22 points in Rasmussen's June poll of the state. Polling movement like this in Maine, and what Rasmussen had shown earlier in the week in Kansas, is probably caused by statistical noise to a certain degree. Nevertheless, it is of a large enough magnitude that it almost certianly isn't caused entirely by statistical noise, especially considering that Obama's lead in both the major national tracking polls is down to a single point. McCain's electoral position has brightened a bit since the July 4 holiday.

In Alaska, a Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos has McCain expanding his lead to 10 points; he had led by 7 in Research 2000's only previous poll of the state in May. While it would certainly be worth Obama's while to visit Alaska, the state now looks like a somewhat less attractive target than Montana or either of the Dakotas.

In Virginia, Rasmussen has John McCain with a one-point lead (the candidates are tied if leaners are not included). In June, Rasmussen had shown Obama with a one-point lead -- however, McCain had led in all of its previous polling of the state. We have characterized Virginia for some time as the closest of the toss-up states. (With the entire Washington establishment within driving distance of Richmond, one can only imagine the chaos that might ensue if there were a recount there).

Lastly, in New Jersey, Strategic Vision has Obama ahead by 9. Based on some research that I have done, Strategic Vision is one of only two polling agencies so far this cycle to show a statistically significant bias in their numbers; their polls tend to be tilted about 3 or 4 points toward the Republican candidate. (The other polling firm in this category is Zogby Interactive, whose numbers tend to be tilted by 3 or 4 points toward the Democratic candidate). So, if Strategic Vision is showing Obama with a 9-point lead in New Jersey, the state is probably pretty darn safe for him.

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Today's Polls, 7/17

A trio of polls from Rasmussen Reports contain relatively good news for Barack Obama.

In Nevada, Obama leads by 2 points after having trailed McCain in each of Rasmussen's last three polls of the state. We tend to group Nevada together with Colorado and New Mexico; but really the states do not have that much in common. Colorado is young, wealthy, and well-educated --increasingly hard to distinguish from reliably blue states like Minnesota or Washington. New Mexico, by contrast, has considerably below-average incomes, and is one of just three majority-minority states on the US mainland.

And Nevada presents a whole different set of circumstances, full of unionized workers and libertarians and Mormons and professional gamblers; and a whole host of local issues ranging from Yucca Mountain to one of the nation's highest foreclosure rates. Point being, it's a difficult state to figure out to begin with, and especially so given its paucity of polling. But between this poll and the Democrats' major gains in voter registration, I think we have to give a slight edge to Obama in Nevada, even though my model is still wont to give a slight edge to McCain.

In North Carolina, John McCain leads Barack Obama by 3 points, which is about the same lead he's held in nearly every poll of the state since April. While the state should remain reasonably close, our model does not particularly like North Carolina as an investment target for Obama, figuring that Obama won't win it without having won Virginia, and that if he's won Virginia, he won't need it.

Lastly, in Arkansas, McCain is 13 points ahead. Obama had trailed 9 points in the June edition of this poll, but by margins a large as 29 points earlier in the spring. Arkansas can't be completely dismissed as an electoral target, simply because if the Clintons commit themselves to some vigorous and sincere barnstorming on Barack Obama's behalf, they'll bring some voters in along with them. But 13 points worth? Probably not without a Clinton on the ticket.

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Yesterday's Polls, 7/16

It's just one poll, and it's not in a state of any enormous amount of electoral significance, but the new Rasmussen poll that shows Barack Obama trailing by 23 points in Kansas -- he had been down by just 10 last month -- is a little ominous. Obama's numbers are bad across the board: he's getting a relatively low percentage of Democrats, trailing by 17 points among independent voters, and his approval ratings are negative. Obama had recently been polling well in other states like Iowa and the Dakotas, and so this may turn out to be some kind of outlier. But the real question is what's going to happen the next time states like Ohio and Indiana are polled, which they haven't been in several weeks and where there's a little bit more at stake. In the meantime, our model is starting to hedge its bets a little more in the Midwest.

Obama has no such problems on the West Coast. Rasmussen has him ahead by 9 in Oregon; the Field Poll gives him a 24-point edge in California, and SurveyUSA has him up by 16 in Washington. Any advantage John McCain might have gained by being a Westerner is being outweighed by his positioning on foreign policy, as the Pacific Coast tends to be the most dovish region of the country.

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Today's Polls, 7/15

After a slow couple of weeks, the pollsters have been very busy in the past 48 hours:



So, what's going on here? A pretty decent set of results for Obama -- but also not ones out of line with our expectations. South Carolina and South Dakota are relatively competitive? We knew that based on how North Carolina and North Dakota had been polling. Iowa looks out of reach for McCain? It's looked that way all year, with the exception of one or two polls taken during the flooding. Obama's numbers look pretty good in the CBS/NYT and ABC/WaPo national polls? Those pollsters have tended to show relatively favorable results for the Democrats all year.

So what looks like a pretty interesting set of polling is really more of the same. Obama is polling a bit of his peak numbers (note that the trendline adjustment now tweaks his numbers downward in states like Florida), but he retains a meaningful lead in the popular vote and some structural advantages in terms of the electoral math.

(Full disclosure: I also caught a small bug that was failing to roll in the trendline adjustment properly in recent days and also overstating the third-party vote. This was inflating Obama's popular vote margin by half a point or so. It has been corrected.)

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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, 7/13

Just a quick note to let you know that the site has been updated to reflect today's national tracking polls. There's nothing at all on the state side today.

Obama lost another point in both Rasmussen (bringing the race to a true dead heat) and Gallup (where he retains a 3-point advantage). It's still not yet enough to convince our model that anything serious is going on. Part of what's going on here, by the way, is that we've really had very light polling volume over the past week or so -- the whole notion that Obama's numbers are tanking is really just based on two surveys (Newsweek and the Rasmussen tracker). We should know more soon enough.

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Today's Polls, 7/11

We'll keep this an appropriately breezy update for a Friday afternoon. In Washington, Rasmussen has Barack Obama leading by 8 points over John McCain. This is a fairly significant decline for Obama, who had led by 18 in Rasmussen's June poll of the state. Is Washington so liberal that Obama's purported shift to the center is harming him there? Probably not. He's still winning self-identified liberal voters by an 87-10 margin, as well as moderates 62-27. Washington looks safe for Obama and this appears to be a case of a poll regressing back the mean. Oregon, though, might deserve watching. If there's any sort of canary-in-the-coal mine in the Pacific Northwest region, we'll see it there first.

In Florida, the debut poll from Gainesville-based War Room Logistics (PDF) has Obama with a slight lead of 2.7 points (we list the decimal place if the pollster does). This continues the oddly bifurcated polling results in Florida: we have several pollsters showing Obama with a slight lead there but a couple others showing a somewhat more comfortable margin for McCain. The problem with Florida is that it is one of the more demographically unique states in the Union -- you have whole groups like Cubans and Jewish voters that barely register in other states, as well as an overdose of older voters. So you can't make good inferences about it from other states, and when the polling is contradictory, there are few reference points. But at a gut-instinct level, our statistical model, which pegs McCain as roughly a 3-point favorite there, sounds about right.

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Today's Polls, 7/10

McCain and Obama are tied in North Dakota?

This isn't news if you've been reading this website for any length of time. Way back in February, before there was even any polling in these states, the beta versions of our regression models were showing Obama competitive in Montana and the Dakotas. That's pretty much how the polling has come in all cycle long.

His reasons for competing in those regions are slightly different between the two different states -- as we learned on the final day of the Democratic primary, there are tangible differences between Montana and the Dakotas electorally. North Dakota is classically moderate; its relatively high education levels and relatively low incidence of evangelical conservatives also play well for Obama. Montana is more libertarian, a group that appears to inclined to like Obama. These are not, by any means, the most important states in this election -- ranked according to our new swing state rankings, Montana and North Dakota rank 16th and 19th, respectively, in terms of their likelihood of alerting the outcome of the election (Alaska is 20th and South Dakota 27th). But on a dollar-for-dollar basis, they are about as good as it gets.

One caution: this poll was taken in the immediate aftermath of an Obama visit to North Dakota, which garnered him some very favorable local press coverage. We still have each of these states tipping to McCain at the end -- but not by such a margin that he can blow them off without risking their electoral votes.

There is further good news for Obama in Wisconsin, where Rasmussen now has Obama with a 10-point lead. Four other recent Wisconsin polls had all shown the state at roughly this margin; Rasmussen had been the holdout, as Obama led by just 2 in their June edition. Wisconsin is a state that McCain probably just has to cut loose; there's also a school of thought that Obama has an extra point or two of give in these numbers once the students get back to UW-Madison in the fall.

By the way, there is a Democrat who displayed this particular strength in the farm states before: Michael Dukakis, who won Wisconsin by 3, Minnesota by 7 and Iowa by 10 in an election that he lost by 8 points overall. Dukakis also outperformed his national numbers in South Dakota (the only other Democrat to have done so in recent times was native son George McGovern). So there does seem to be some particular node on the matrix where Democrats to well in this region -- fortunately for Obama, he appears to accompany it with a lot more strengths elsewhere than Dukakis had.

Ironically, this is coupled with some not-so-great numbers for Obama in Illinois, where Rasmussen has him ahead by only 11. On the one hand, this result would not be completely shocking: I've generally shown the home-state advantage to be worth something like 6-7 points, and if you took Obama's roughly 4 point margin in Ohio and Michigan and added that cushion to it, you'd get right at this number. But Illinois has polled substantially better than Ohio and Michigan in the last couple of cycles for the Democrat. I think, certainly, we can take the over on that 11-point number; on the ground here in Chicago, I haven't detected any kind of organic, anti-Obama sentiment. But there may be something to the notion that a candidate gets an extra bit of scrutiny from his home state at different stages of the process, particularly at the point where he ceases to become their senator and instead instead the nation's candidate.

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Today's Polls, 7/9

If Memorial Day marks the start of political spring training, and Labor Day the start of the playoffs, the July 4th holiday might be the beginning of the regular season. John McCain comes out of the break with one of his stronger polling days in some time.

There are two polls out in Missouri, both of which give McCain the lead. Rasmussen places his lead at 5 points, and Public Policy Polling puts it 3. This marks a reversal from a period where Obama had been polling fairly strongly in Missouri, having held the lead in Rasmussen's last poll conducted about a month ago.

There might, however, be a relatively simple explanation for this one: McCain has been saturating the state with advertising. Should Obama fight back? Well, he already is, having tripled his staff in the state. So, we might have the makings of an old-school air-versus-ground battle. But I also think that Missouri could be a little bit of a trap state for Obama. Our model, which now accounts for the relationships between the states in more sophisticated ways (more on this shortly), found only 43 simulation runs out of 10,000 when Obama won Missouri while losing Ohio. Missouri is essentially Ohio with 15 percent more evangelicals -- I don't think that's outweighed by its sharing a border with Illinois, but I can understand if the Obama people feel differently.

Another interesting state is New Jersey, where Rasmussen shows John McCain closing to within 3 points (5 if leaners are not included). Rasmussen has generally had New Jersey much closer than other pollsters, and as we noted this weekend, it is an exceptionally expensive state to compete in. Nevertheless, it has different demographics from virtually any other swing state -- McCain's one window into the Mid-Atlantic region. If he runs somewhat to the left, emphasizing his fiscal conservatism to wealthy New Jersey suburbanites while deemphasizing the guns and gays stuff (Scott Rasmussen also likes the offshore drilling issue for