McCain and Obama are tied in North Dakota?
This
isn't news if you've been reading this website for any length of time.
Way back in February, before there was even any polling in these
states, the beta versions of our regression models were showing Obama competitive in Montana and the Dakotas. That's pretty much how the polling has come in all cycle long.
His
reasons for competing in those regions are slightly different between
the two different states -- as we learned on the final day of the
Democratic primary, there are tangible differences between Montana and
the Dakotas electorally. North Dakota is classically moderate; its
relatively high education levels and relatively low incidence of
evangelical conservatives also play well for Obama. Montana is more
libertarian, a group that appears to inclined to like Obama. These are not, by any means, the most important states in this election -- ranked according to our new swing state rantings,
Montana and North Dakota rank 16th and 19th, respectively, in terms of
their likelihood of alerting the outcome of the election (Alaska is
20th and South Dakota 27th). But on a dollar-for-dollar basis, they are
about as good as it gets.
One caution: this poll was taken in the immediate aftermath of an Obama visit to North Dakota, which garnered him some very favorable local press coverage.
We still have each of these states tipping to McCain at the end -- but
not by such a margin that he can blow them off without risking their
electoral votes.
There is further good news for Obama in Wisconsin,
where Rasmussen now has Obama with a 10-point lead. Four other recent
Wisconsin polls had all shown the state at roughly this margin;
Rasmussen had been the holdout, as Obama led by just 2 in their June
edition. Wisconsin is a state that McCain probably just has to cut
loose; there's also a school of thought that Obama has an extra point
or two of give in these numbers once the students get back to
UW-Madison in the fall.
By the way, there is a Democrat who displayed this particular strength in the farm states before: Michael Dukakis,
who won Wisconsin by 3, Minnesota by 7 and Iowa by 10 in an election
that he lost by 8 points overall. Dukakis also outperformed his
national numbers in South Dakota (the only other Democrat to have done so
in recent times was native son George McGovern). So there does seem to
be some particular node on the matrix where Democrats to well in this
region -- fortunately for Obama, he appears to accompany it with a lot
more strengths elsewhere than Dukakis had.
Ironically, this is coupled with some not-so-great numbers for Obama in Illinois,
where Rasmussen has him ahead by only 11. On the one hand, this result
would not be completely shocking: I've generally shown the home-state
advantage to be worth something like 6-7 points, and if you took
Obama's roughly 4 point margin in Ohio and Michigan and added that
cushion to it, you'd get right at this number. But Illinois has polled
substantially better than Ohio and Michigan in the last couple of
cycles for the Democrat. I think, certainly, we can take the over on
that 11-point number; on the ground here in Chicago, I haven't detected
any kind of organic, anti-Obama sentiment. But there may be something
to the notion that a candidate gets an extra bit of scrutiny from his
home state at different stages of the process, particularly at the
point where he ceases to become their senator and instead instead the nation's candidate.
--Nate Silver