This is a Saturday for beer and baseball and not for polling, but we do have one result out. In Washington, SurveyUSA
has Barack Obama leading John McCain by 15 points. SurveyUSA conducts
two separate sets of Washington polls each month. This month, Barack
Obama has led in those surveys by 15 and 17 points; last month, he led
by 16 and 12.
As The Stranger
has noted, Barack Obama has dropped Washington and Oregon from his
first large-scale general election ad buy. That is because there really
isn't any indication that those states are going to be at all close.
Washington (State) and Oregon like their Democrats pretty liberal, but
like much of the West, they aren't particularly fond of candidates from
the D.C. establishment. Barack Obama's is not (yet) perceived as a
creature of Washington, and so he's getting pretty much the best of
both worlds in these states. They're also especially unhappy with the
Iraq war, a bad fit for the increasingly hawkish McCain. Although these
cross-tabs aren't available in today's version of the SurveyUSA poll,
Barack Obama led 82-14 among voters whose top priority is the Iraq war in their Washington poll last week.
The only other numbers we've got for you are from the national tracking polls: Gallup
is unchanged from yesterday, showing the race at Obama 46, McCain 44.
Obama ticked up one point to gain a 5-point advantage in the Rasmussen tracker.
--Nate Silver