Gonna try and make it to the Cubs game tonight, which means that I've
got a ton of work to do this afternoon, which means that ... you're
getting a rare AM edition of Today's Polls. And it's a good one for
Barack Obama:
What's up with those Quinnipiac polls? Why have I listed them twice?
Well,
Quinnipiac broke its sample into two halves: pre-debate and
post-debate. For all intents and purposes, these are two separate
surveys, and so that's how I list them. Obama gained ground in the
post-debate versions in all three states (OH, PA, and FL).
More
importantly, however, the polls represent significant gains for Obama
since the last time Quinnipiac had been in the field in early
September, particularly in Florida, where he had been 7 points behind
before.
The McCain camp is going a little crazy
over these polls. Usually, when a campaign does something like that,
it's worried about morale. But do their complaints have any basis in
fact?
Quinnipiac's polls have shown a slight Democratic lean
this cycle -- they've been 1-2 points more favorable to Dems than
contemporaneous polls of their states. From what I can tell, their head
of polling (Peter Brown) has fairly conservative politics, so I don't
know that it can be called a partisan lean. But that is the side that the polls have tended to end up upon nevertheless.
At the same time, they are highly-rated
polls, use large sample sizes, and have plenty of rich trendlines for
comparison. Is it possible that they are outliers to a certain degree?
Possibly -- maybe even probably -- but as I intimated yesterday, with Obama's surge nationally it was inevitable that we were eventually going to get an oh sh*t
set of state polling for Obama. There clearly seems to have been some
movement toward Obama in Florida, as well as in Pennsylvania, where the
Morning Call tracker has had him gaining a point literally every day since its inception. Ohio, I am somewhat less convinced about, but InsiderAdvantage also gives him the lead there (as well as a 6-point lead in Virginia).
The
most critical point may be that the McCain campaign now faces something
of a Hobson's choice. In terms of states where they had hoped to play
offense, Michigan began to break away from them a week or so ago, and
now Pennsylvania -- which had initially reacted well to Sarah Palin --
seems to be doing the same. But if all they're doing is playing
defense, that gives Obama so many scratch-off tickets -- Colorado,
Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and perhaps Indiana, Nevada,
and Missouri -- that it's essentially inevitable that he'll get lucky
in one or more of those states, several of which he already appears to
have the lead in.
My gut instinct if I were the McCain campaign is that it might be time to pick one
of Pennsylvania and Michigan -- whichever state my internals liked
better -- and consolidate my offense there. McCain certainly can't be
spending time in Iowa, where he spent much of yesterday, but where he
has never led a single public poll against Obama.
--Nate Silver