New Quinnipiac polling in four states contains pretty good news for John McCain.
In
Colorado, Quinnipiac has McCain ahead by 2 points, 46-44. This is the
only Colorado poll in which McCain has led all year, save for an
oddball results from the GOP-affiliated firm TargetPoint Consulting
back in early April. Obama had led by 5 points in Quinnipiac's prior
poll of Colorado, taken at the height of Obama's post-primary bounce
last month.
Obama maintains his lead in the other three states
in this box set, but it is smaller than before in each instance. In
Michigan, Obama now leads by 4 points after having been 6 points ahead
in June. In Wisconsin, his lead is down from 13 points to a
still-healthy 11-point margin. But in Minnesota, the tightening is far
more substantial, with Obama's lead going from 17 points to just 2.
Rasmussen
also has numbers out today from another swing state, New Hampshire,
where Obama holds a 4-point lead -- broadly in line with the recent UNH
and ARG surveys -- after having led by 11 in June.
I hope that
there is no longer any question that this is more than just statistical
noise. Yes, there are individual results we can critique. It's hard to
imagine Obama running 9 points stronger in Wisconsin than he does in
Minnesota, for instance. And Quinnipiac's results from Colorado are a
little odd, as Obama leads among independent voters and does as well as
McCain does amongst his party, but trails slightly overall (Quinnipiac
does not weight its results by party ID). Our model is designed to
account for this noise in a variety of different ways, and for the
moment, it doesn't take the possibility of a McCain win in Minnesota
seriously, and still regards Obama as a very narrow favorite in
Colorado.
But our model is also designed to evaluate trends, and
there is an increasingly large body of evidence that Obama is now
polling somewhere between 3-4 points off his peak numbers. In the grand
scheme of things, that doesn't mean all that much -- it means that
perhaps 1 in every 60 strangers you encounter on the street has
switched from Obama to McCain within the last month. The more relevant
question is where the downtrend dates from. If you look at our tracking
graph, it seems to have started -- or at least steepened -- coming out
of the July 4 holiday, when some of the Obama is a flip-flopper
narrative began to take root. I am less convinced that Obama is getting
an anti-bounce out of his trip abroad, and would remind you that there
is a lagged effect before certain stories take hold, particularly in
the dog days of the summer when the public's attention span for
campaign coverage is limited.
The alternate hypothesis is that
this is simply a reflection of McCain's greater investments in
advertising in the early campaign, something we'll explore at greater
length soon.
--Nate Silver