One might even infer that a vote for McCain would improve the economy! SPIN!

Economy is a terrorist! It's going down causing America's Hero to lose support. Damn economy making us surrender in iraq confirmed.

I really want to know why Obama can't close the deal.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/
Virginia is leaning Obama now. Obama can win currently without winning any of RCP's toss up states.

A few new other polls of note today:

West Virginia (now a toss up from leaning McCain)

New Missourri numbers (back to McCain slightly)

New Ohio numbers:

New Florida numbers:

11% lead, oh noes, 12% of Americans are closet racists who will say one thing in a poll and another in the privacy of a voting booth.

As of October 10th, 2008.

Obama: 343

McCain: 184

Tie: 11

• North Carolina went from a tie to slightly McCain.
• Missouri went from slightly Obama to a tie.

The Webmaster at electoral-vote.com has this to say about the accuracy of polling this year:

Polling's Perfect Storm?

According to Mark Blumenthal at National Journal, there are three factors at work that may cause polls to be way off this year. They are:

1. 20% of all households don't have a landline and they are mostly younger voters
2. The "Bradley Effect" in which white voters tell pollsters they will vote for a black guy but don't
3. Likely voter models may not capture the electorate correctly

Cell-phone-only voters are young and strongly pro-Obama and may cause his strength to be understated. The effect can be compensated for by weighting 18-29 year olds in sufficient numbers (but see below). The second effect is unknown although it did not appear to be a big factor in the primaries. This effect would cause McCain's strength to appear weaker than it really is. Finally, the likely voter models assume there is some way to tell who will vote and who won't. This year that is very hard to gauge and demographic models based on the 2004 exit polls may not be worth much. On the other hand, these effects may all cancel. It is a tough call.

^ I guess the Bradley Effect isn't what I had thought it was from what I read in this thread. The black guy doesn't LOSE points, he just loses the undecided vote (effectively, anyway).

"• The Bradley-Wilder Effect. I have written about this issue here before, but the critical idea is not that some voters "just won't vote for Barack Obama because he's black." Rather, what pollsters fear is that in the context of a survey interview, some respondents may fail to tell the truth about their preferences due to some "social discomfort" arising from Obama's race.

"In the 1980s and early 1990s, in a series of contests between black and white candidates -- including the historic gubernatorial candidacies of Tom Bradley in California in 1982 and Doug Wilder in Virginia in 1989 -- polls typically understated support for the white candidate. The black candidates would receive roughly the same percentage of the vote on Election Day that they did on the last poll, while the white candidates did surprisingly better than the polls predicted. Handicappers started to assume that most of the undecided vote in such contests would "break" for the white candidate.

"Over the last 10 years, according to a paper [PDF] by Harvard post-doctoral fellow Daniel Hopkins that studied 133 statewide races between 1989 and 2006, the apparent polling bias in such races largely disappeared. But can we assume that Bradley-Wilder will remain in remission this fall?"

The Bradley Effect may be severely diminished by the horrible economic news that is happening almost daily.

Anyways, here are the most recent national poll numbers, electoral count, and battleground state numbers from RCP:

National:

Electoral Count:

Battleground States:

Ohio (20)	48.8	45.7	Obama +3.1	Toss Up	Bush +2.1	Bush +3.5
Florida (27)	48.5	45.4	Obama +3.1	Toss Up	Bush +5.0	Bush +0.1
Nevada (5)	49.6	46.6	Obama +3.0	Toss Up	Bush +2.6	Bush +3.5
North Carolina (15)	48.4	46.6	Obama +1.8	Toss Up	Bush +12.4	Bush +12.8
Missouri (11)	47.4	47.8	McCain +0.4	Toss Up	Bush +7.2	Bush +3.3
Indiana (11)	45.0	48.8	McCain +3.8	Toss Up	Bush +20.7	Bush +15.7
Colorado (9)	49.3	45.3	Obama +4.0	Toss Up	Bush +4.7	Bush +8.4
West Virginia (5)	44.3	46.5	McCain +2.2	Toss Up	Bush +12.9	Bush +6.3
Virginia (13)	50.0	44.9	Obama +5.1	Leaning	Bush +8.2	Bush +8.1
Wisconsin (10)	51.4	42.6	Obama +8.8	Leaning	Kerry +0.4	Gore +0.2
Michigan (17)	49.8	41.6	Obama +8.2	Leaning	Kerry +3.4	Gore +5.2
New Mexico (5)	49.8	42.5	Obama +7.3	Leaning	Bush +0.7	Gore +0.1
Washington (11)	49.8	41.8	Obama +8.0	Leaning	Kerry +8.2	Gore +5.5
Georgia (15)	43.8	51.2	McCain +7.4	Leaning	Bush +16.6	Bush +11.7

The first campaign I worked for was the McGovern campaign. It wasn't much of a job, just putting flyers out. My campaign issue was the Vietnam war. One of my uncles had died in Vietnam, my father had done one tour of duty there and was getting ready to go for another. My other three uncles in the service had done a combined five tours and one was currently in theater.

The McGovern loss was a big wake-up call for the Democratic Party. They leaned too far to the left and McGovern didn't even carry his home state. For the last couple of months I've been seeing a similar parallel in this national election, but now, on the Republican side. Today, reading an article, I found someone else put it in far better words than I could:

The economy is irrelevant compared with religious identity. What this campaign may be doing is stripping most secular Republicans and independents from the GOP coalition. We could be left with a purely sectarian-Christianist rump, which will control the GOP for a generation. And McCain will have distilled Rove's religious coalition in eight weeks more effectively than Bush in eight years!

What we may be seeing is all the dangerous trends I identified in "The Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom and the Future Of The Right" being brought to faster and more potent fruition by the combination of an economic crisis, a black Democratic candidate and a far-right Christianist unknown like Palin. It is as if the McCain-Palin campaign is acting as a purgative of moderate or centrist Republicanism in this atmosphere. What this could portend is that the GOP could become reduced to a George Wallace rump - even more than it now is. And from that scorched piece of earth, it will be much harder to recover in the short or medium run. Source