Well, the polling day started out slow, but by mid-afternoon it picked up a head of steam with ARG's release of new survey data from from seven states. The biggest news there? West Virginia giving eight points to Obama. The Mountain state, not content to see its eastern neighbor provide the Illinois senator with an eight point

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Wednesday was a surprisingly slow polling day, especially for a week day. And for the first time in a while you'll see a group of polls that is majority red. Sadly for the McCain campaign, all that red is from one state, Oklahoma, where a slew of backlogged polls got some attention from the poll-gathering sites. When that fact

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But the real change is in the perception of the race with Michigan and Pennsylvania in the Obama lean category. With that change Obama is now relatively safe in states totaling 260 electoral votes and as you'll see just below on the Watch List, New Hampshire is also close to joining that group as well. The two comparable categ

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Whether you count it as two points or .1 (Only the latter is correct. The data on the former was from a question concerning which candidate would better deal with the current economic situation.), the margin in Elon's poll of North Carolina continues to be a troubling trend for the McCain campaign. Anything there favoring Obam

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After the debate there was plenty to talk about last night, but the state polls released during the day yesterday and into the night/early morning were certainly noteworthy as well. In total there were 16 new polls in 14 states. And in most cases, the post-Lehman conventional wisdom prevailed. In most cases...
Florida, Michiga

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Who says change can't happen, even at the site with the most conservative electoral college methodology? I find it somewhat ironic that I, just yesterday, made light of the feasibility of a 10 point Obama margin in Virginia and today that exact number appeared in the CNN survey results. There's no sense in hiding that. Virgin

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September closes with a lot of red on the map, but unfortunately for John McCain none of that red comes in any state that isn't already favoring him in FHQ's weighted averages. And the blue comes places the Arizona senator absolutely cannot yield. But that's pretty much par for the course for the Republican's 2008 standard

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What emerged on Sunday was a trio of polls from states that seem pretty set in their ways. Connecticut is a strong Obama state, just as Kentucky and Tennessee are safe states for McCain. The Survey USA poll of Connecticut is certainly in line with FHQ's weighted average of the state's polls. In Kentucky and Tennessee, though,

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There's one state for each candidate here. Obama maintains a heavy lean in Iowa. With the line here between the strong category and the lean category now at a nine point margin, Iowa is on the verge of joining the Watch List. And for a state that some considered a toss up heading into the contest -- a number that is dwindling

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The way the polls came out on Thursday, you'd think the firms were all trying to get them released ahead of something. A debate, say. Regardless, there were 28 surveys in 16 states to pick through; enough that you could cherry-pick results if you wanted to. The problem was that McCain just didn't have that much to point to in

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I'm still trying to sort out this McCain campaign suspension and the possibility of a debate delay. This obviously hasn't happened before. And as history (and Thomas Holbrook in Do Campaigns Matter?) would tell us, presidential election years rarely overlap with economic or military crises. But here we have one smack dab in t

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A crazy political news day was marked by equally crazy polling. A trio of Obama toss ups all did their best John Kerry impressions, moving toward competitiveness before moving away from it. Michigan, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania had two polls apiece and each state's pair of polls contradicted each other. All in all there wa

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There's a lot of blue in the polls today. But there's good blue and bad blue. For Obama, there's good blue in states like Colorado, Michigan, Oregon and Wisconsin, states vital to a coaltion that sums to 270 electoral votes. And that good blue still overshadows the continued bad blue that has become Minnesota. The North Star

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There's some good and some bad for each candidate in the polls out yesterday. Most of the good seems to be on Obama's side. There has been some contraction of the margins recently in states like Minnesota, New Mexico and New Jersey, but the surveys that were released just yesterday, showed some movement back toward Obama in e

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The other day one of FHQ's loyal readers, SarahLawrenceScott, proposed an alternate way of looking at the presidential race and for mapping the trends to the electoral college. State-by-state trial-heat polls are still the data of choice, but what Scott has done is to set the lines of demarcation between different states based

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