The headliner tonight is in Virginia,
where Rasmussen has Barack Obama moving into a tiny, 1-point lead after
having trailed John McCain by 3 points in May. Virginia has been a
Democratic target from the get-go in this campaign, but it's of
particular importance to Obama because it unlocks another series of
parlays for his winning the election. If Plan A was holding the Kerry
states and winning Ohio, and Plan B was winning Iowa and 2-3 of the
Southwestern swing states, Plan C is winning the Kerry states plus Iowa
and Virginia, which would get him to 272 electoral votes.
Two other polling results also show a bounce for Obama. In Kansas, John McCain leads by 10 in a Rasmussen poll; he had led by 22 a month ago. And in New York (which is polled way more than it needs to be), Obama leads by 18 in a Siena
poll, up from 11 last month. If you mapped the states out in
n-dimensional space according to their demographic characteristics, New
York, Virginia and Kansas would form something of an equilateral
triangle. Obama has received a pretty significant bounce in each of
them, suggesting that his uptick is fairly widespread.
--Nate Silver