Beginning today, I will be cross-posting the daily polling thread at The Plank. For those of you who don't know me, I am the proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com,
which is sort of a self-help group for polling junkies. Most all of the
rest of my blogging will remain exclusive to FiveThirtyEight, except
when I feel like making fun of Jonathan Chait. We are, however, also
contemplating a weekly, graphics-intensive feature in TNR's print
edition.
It's a good day to get started, because the pollsters are up bright and early. Yesterday, we noted that Obama had experienced about a 5-point bounce
in his state-by-state polls since Hillary Clinton's withdraw from her
campaign, and today we are continuing to see some favorable results for
him in other states.
In Wisconsin, Obama leads John McCain by 13 points in a University of Wisconsin / WisPolitics.com
poll. Strictly speaking, this is the debut edition of this poll, and so
we have no trendlines against which to compare. But the poll is
conducted by Charles Franklin of pollster.com
and his colleague Ken Goldstein, and so should be pretty solid. The
continuum of Midwestern states goes something like Michigan- Ohio-
Pennsylvania- Wisconsin- Iowa- Minnesota in order of most competitive
to least competitive (one can argue that the order of Michigan and Ohio
should be inverted). In each of these states, the Democrats have a
pretty strong advantage in terms of party identification, and Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania are the two that might come off John McCain's board if
Obama's bounce has some legs.
Meanwhile, Rasmussen
shows Obama with an 18-point lead in Washington. We have gotten used to
seeing double-digit leads for Obama on the West Coast, but this is
nevertheless an improvement from his 11-point lead in Rasmussen's May
poll. We now show Obama as having a 98 percent chance of winning
Washington. For the sake of comparison, Obama is roughly as likely to
win Mississippi or Wyoming as he is to lose Washington.
In Massachusetts, a Suffolk University
poll shows Obama with a 23-point lead. While it's not intrinsically
surprising to see a Democrat with a large lead in Massachusetts, the
state had not been polled that much, and one of the two pollsters who
had polled it (SurveyUSA)
was showing a relatively close race. Massachusetts has a lot of Hillary
Clinton supporters, so it should not be surprising to see Obama's
numbers improve there as he consolidates their support.
The modest exception to all of this is in New Jersey, where Quinnipiac
shows Obama with a relatively tepid 6-point lead; Obama had led by 7
points in Quinnipiac's February poll of the Garden State. Other New
Jersey polling has shown Obama with a somewhat larger lead. Whether the
state becomes a fall battleground may depend as much on the Senate
race, where some polling has shown Frank Lautenberg surprisingly vulnerable, as anything that takes place at the Presidential level.
Overall, our simulations give Obama a 54.9 percent chance of winning the election; this is his highest figure since March 18. As new polling begins to roll in from states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, that lead is likely to get larger before it gets smaller.
UPDATE: More late-bouncing developments in Iowa, where Rasmussen has Obama ahead 45-38. That 7-point lead is an improvement from the 2-point lead that Obama held in Rasmussen's prior Iowa poll.
--Nate Silver