Latest Pew poll--big Obama lead.

That Pew poll seems to be an outlier. Most of the national polls (as seen by the summaries on FiveThirtyEight) have been tightening, and now have Obama up by 4% to 9%.

In any case, the electoral college is what counts. Obama is leading all of the states that went for Kerry in 2004, and several that went for Bush. He appears almost certain to pick up Iowa and New Mexico, giving him 264 in the electoral college (270 needed to win). In addition, Obama has slight leads in Colorado (9 EC votes) and Virginia(!) (13 EC votes). Of the tossup states, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio appear to be trending to Obama.

You can click on any state in this map for current polls, trends, and 2004 results.

Pew has a tremendous reputation and is about as non partisan as it gets. One would expect that you are probably right though Oregon--that it will be much closer on election day. I agree very much about figuring individually by the states but even when McCain had drawn ahead a bit in early September before the Wall St. collapse Obama was well ahead of him in electoral vote projections--all New England, the mid Atlantic states down into Virginia and maybe even North Carolina is Obama territory and then moving into the rust belt and the midwest he has big problems. His only hopes are Ohio, Missouri, Indiana and West Virginia and none of them are anywhere near locks. This seems way too much for him to overcome at this stage--he doesn't have the money--heard he was moving out of Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico today--he doesn't have nearly enough organization. Florida as well is leaning Obama's way--two weeks to go and if things don't change this could be a massacre.

Pew may be right. FiveThirtyEight has posted another batch of today's polls, and most show Obama regaining the few points McCain had picked up over the past week or two.

GWU/Battleground has McCain only 1 point behind in national polling, but they don't have much of a track record. CBS/New York Times show Obama with a 13 point lead, Gallup and NBC/Wall Street Journal have it at 10 points.

It seems to me that there unusual amount of spread in the polling results this year. It seems like the findings are strongly influenced by the sampling approach. You see some of the spread in the different results reported by Gallup (traditional) vs. Gallup (expanded). Also Zogby was trying to create balance in the sample so that enough Democrats and Republicans were polled -- but that tended to reduce the Obama vote, because Zogby did not adjust fully for the increase in the proportion of self identified Democrats and the decrease in the proportion of self identified Republicans.

Another indicator is the Iowa futures market for voting prediction. Right now it reports an 85% probability of an Obama win. The futures market was pretty accurate in picking Bush in 2000 and 2004.

According to the latest WSJ/NBC poll, Obama-Biden lead among Joe the Plumbers and Sixpacks, as well as the Richard Fulds http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122462257051655701.html?mod=djemalertNEWS#projec...

Women prefer Obama-Biden.

The Palin bubble has burst: "The one candidate whose popularity has fallen is Gov. Palin: 38% see her positively, down from 44% two weeks ago; 47% see her negatively, up 10 points from the last poll. That's the highest negative rating of the four candidates. Fifty-five percent of voters say Gov. Palin is not qualified to be president if the need arises, up from 50% two weeks ago."

Someone (Cindy McCain?) has been bidding up McCain on Intrade.

CQ Politics: Trader Drove Up Price of McCain ‘Stock’ in Online Market

Zubin Jelveh at Condé Nast: Odd Numbers: No Manipulation at Intrade. This one has links to related articles.

>6 theoria:

Women prefer Obama-Biden

That is especially true for unmarried women. From today's Harris poll (I added the bold emphasis):

...Obama leads by twenty-two points in the East and nineteen points in the West. McCain leads by fourteen points in the South. The race is closer in the Midwest where Obama’s lead is eight points;

Obama’s support is much stronger among younger voters; he has a 26 point lead among Echo Boomers, those aged 18 to 31. McCain does better among older voters and has a lead of 2 points among Matures, those aged 63 and over. He also has a two point lead among Generation Xers (those aged 32-43) while Obama has a 6 point lead among Baby Boomers, those aged 44-62;

The gender gap has returned as Obama leads by 15 points among women. McCain leads by one point among men. Among women, there is a large marital gap as Obama leads by 33 points among single women while McCain leads up three points among married women;

Obama has a huge 82 point lead among blacks and a clear 16 point lead among Hispanic voters. McCain leads by 11 points among whites...

Various studies have identified unmarried women as an untapped resource for liberal and Democratic candidates. Looks like the voter registration effort for the primary got some of them involved.

8>
I wonder if the single-women gap (for Obama) is a result of Clinton's candidacy.

The religion gap (again for Obama) is also striking. Only white evangelicals favor McCain. I was surprised to see Catholics supporting Obama-Biden http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=349

>9 theoria:

The gender gap is much more pronounced this time, possibly because single women have not fared well under Bush (didn't get any of the big tax cuts, turned off by the "family values" crowd, turned off by Lily Ledbetter pay discrimination decision in the Supreme Court, etc.). But the gap was evident in the 2004 presidential election.

Male voters: 55% Bush, 44% Kerry
Female voters: 51% Kerry, 48% Bush

Married voters (no breakout for women): Bush 57%, Kerry 42%
Unmarried voters: Kerry 58%, Bush 40%

McCain's campaign IMO has always been weak on policy. When talking to the base he's basically supported the status quo of the last 8 years even if he would like people to think he's an independent person--he comes across as a 2nd GWB. There is no traction there. His own parties declining numbers as well as Obama's obvious edge in raising cash--the organization that Obama has set up in so many places that in the past voted republican that seem to be or on the verge of being flipped have left him pretty much confused. What has been left for some time for him to do is go negative and there has been little traction there--the problem really being that the Ayers story is not the story his campaign would like us to believe. He has Rezko. He has Wright--which may be his best. The idea that Obama is a secret Marxist is laughable. Obama is a very clean politician.

Theoria>

The reason evangelicals are backing McCain is because they're such realists; they know how to put emotion aside and really think objectively.

So now it seems McCain is going to focus on PA, although Obama appears to have an insurmountable lead there. Here is some speculation about what McCain is planning.

Meanwhile, Obama is off to visit his grandmother, possibly for the last time. The resemblance to his grandfather is striking, but I think the smile comes from Grandma.

@ 14 -- thank you for drawing my attention to that site. Amazing pics.

Thomas Frank at the Wall Street Journal: Joe the Plumber and GOP 'Authenticity'

Just one more. So much good stuff out there today.

Roger Simon at Politico: Democrats' gloom deepens.

The Democrats are poised on the brink of victory. And they cannot stand it. The news is too good. Something has to go wrong...

...Awful news. Obama has a money problem. And you know what it is? He might run out of time to spend all the money he has! Election Day might come and go before Obama can spend the $5 million a day he is now raising. (If this does happen, I suggest he borrow a page from Oprah and buy everyone in America a Pontiac. Just as a gesture.)

Obama himself has reacted to the dismal drumbeat of good news. At a fundraising concert in Manhattan last Thursday featuring Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, Obama got up and said: “Don’t underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don’t underestimate our ability to screw it up.”

Which is the prevailing mood in the top echelons of the Democratic Party right now. The McCain campaign cannot possibly be as hapless as it looks, party leaders feel. It is lulling the Democrats into complacency. The Republicans have to have an October surprise, because the Republicans always have an October surprise....

As I've said a couple of times in another thread, the Republican belief in the post modern idea that one perceived reality is as good as another will lead ultimately to a totalitarian system. As the "perceived reality" moves further and further away from reality it requires more and more top down control to maintain. The natural inclination of reality to emerge from the bottom up is the enemy of "perceived realities" (pr) because they will, over time, replace the pr.

Maintaining the pr requires more and more direct control by the government. The economic bailout is an example of this. The bailout is not as much an attempt to allow reality into the markets slowly to minimize disruptions as it is a government attempt to maintain the pr by massive injections of what brung us to this dance. BushCo and Paulsen came up with a government sponsored and administered bank bailout program and then told the banks not only was the government going to fix things in a particular way, but if a bank wanted to survive they would be required to sign on to the program. Meanwhile we get further and further from the reality of too many people too over leveraged with credit from credit cards to loans without any way out short of a punitive bankruptcy. We're going to solve this problem not by squeezing excess credit out of the system, but by injecting more credit into it. Where is the economic reality in that?

Ultimately, the pr will collapse and the void will be filled by a stripped down, basic form of reality. The classic example of this arc can be found in the development and ultimate collapse of Communism in Russia.

Continued Republican belief in the pr will lead to the same problems here. As money streams in an ever widening river from the middle class to the upper classes more control over our lives will be exerted on us to conform with the pr until the government is involved in all aspects of our lives, maintaining the ever increasingly difficult fiction that the government sponsored pr is "working". Once again we have Russia to look to for our example. After the collapse of Communism there was a fledgling democracy with a growing middle class. Then, mostly because of Reaganomics being introduced by BushCo as the exemplar of capitalism the oligarchs came to power and engaged a program to choke off the democracy movement and it's incipient middle class. Once again reality was not allowed to develop. When Russia collapses the next time, it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes a near feudal society.

I find it very ironic that Reaganomics is likely to leave both the US and Russia as totalitarian systems propping up the greatest income transfer frauds in history.

I have seen just one explanation of what is really happening to our economy, and I've only seen it once. Basically it's like a poker game. In poker, over time, all the money becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As this goes along, more and more players, in order to stay in the game have to borrow money. Of course they continue to lose this borrowed money until they cannot borrow any more and are forced to drop out. This is what's happening now. Fewer and fewer people are solvent, more and more are teetering on the edge of (thanks to BushCo) a very painful bankruptcy. This is the result of Reaganomics, and Reaganomics is predicated around the continuation of this continued inequity. Joe the Plumber is at the bottom of all this.

The underlying problem here is this country while paying lip service to God, worships wealth. Idolatry is always a loser.

-14 That sad news had me a little down yesterday (especially because he was going to be here on Thursday, and we were so excited! but then he had to cancel, for obvious reasons), but this poll cheers me up. The big poll aggregate on Pollster is still looking pretty good too (much closer at 50-43).

-18 The "perceived reality" drives me crazy too. I keep talking to undecided voters that swear they cannot make a decision because the two candidates/campaigns keep saying different things. They seem unable to grasp the idea that when two statements of fact are in direct opposition, one of them is a lie and one of them is the truth, and that the information that will tell you which is which exists out there in the world. They'd rather just say "well, but McCain says he's a terrorist sympathizer", "McCain says he is going to raise my taxes", "Palin says she didn't abuse her power in office", as if these statements are proof in themselves. I wish people would just look at voting records to see how much of a "maverick" they are dealing with. Facts matter!

I also like that description of the economy. It kills me when people start blaming the general citizenry for a lack of thrift when no amount of saving will ever allow a normal middle-class person to buy a house, or often even a car, outright. When prices are so extreme in comparison to income, debt is to be expected.

Here's what I mean about a big spread in the polling numbers. The AP-GFK poll:

http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com/

says Obama is up by only 1 point. That, IMHO, would not be enough for an Obama victory, given the probability of some vote caging and some Bradley effect. On the other hand, the Pew poll, only a few days older, showed Obama with a 14 point lead. What gives?? Why are these numbers so different????

>20 jmcgarve:

The difference comes from the sample size in the poll and the voter model they use - how many from each party, what ages, what genders, what race/ethnicity, registered or likely voters (and how to define "likely") etc. Incredibly, after the major voter registration efforts of the past 18 months, some polling groups are still basing their "likely voter" mix on the 2004 elections.

FiveThirtyEight has posted some thoughts on the differences between various tracking polls and voter models.

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics explains some of the recent polling oddities in A Note on the Polls.

In The New Republic, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight explains how McCain's policies and demographic changes are causing McCain to lose some of Arizona's neighboring states in the Southwest: How the West Was Lost.