No rest for the pollsters on Sunday:
So ... what's the headline here? Probably the Public Policy Polling
survey showing a 46-46 tie there. One wonders if the McCain campaign's
internals are telling them something similar, since they are now shifting resources into the state. And Barack Obama was out in Charlotte today.
But yet, my model still does not consider North Carolina to be a plausible tipping point state. Why not?
Partly because the polling there has hardly been uniformly favorable to
Obama -- it was barely ten days ago when SuvreyUSA released a poll
showing him down 20 points in the state. But mostly, it comes down to
the parameters of the electoral math that we have discussed here
before. It is unlikely that Obama wins North Carolina without winning
Virginia -- this parlay occurred just 103 times out of the 10,000
simulations we ran today. And if he's won Virginia, Obama likely won't
need North Carolina to win the election -- he'll already be well past
270 eletoral votes.
...Unless, maybe, something goes wrong in
the Midwest. For instance, if Obama were to lose Pennsylvania or
Michigan (in addition to Ohio), then the Virginia/North Carolina parlay
would probably save the election for him. So, of course, would a
Virginia/Florida parlay, which seems more probable at the moment,
although the Obama campaign has a larger ground game advantage in North
Carolina than they do in Florida.
The reason this discussion is
interesting, I suppose, is if you believe there is some sort of Bradley
Effect, perhaps coupled with a reverse Bradley Effect in the South. The
polling badly underestimated Obama's performance in the South
during the primaries, while being roughly accurate elsewhere in the
country. Suppose that the polls are 3 points low on Obama in the South,
but that there is some sort of Bradley Effect in the Midwest, and his
polls are 2 points high there. In that instance, North Carolina (in
addition to Virginia and Florida) become quite important.
John McCain, meanwhile, gets a good number in Ohio from the University of Cincinnati, which conducted a survey for a consortium of Ohio newspapers.
UC also puts out polling under its own brand name -- they had shown
McCain 4 points ahead a couple of weeks ago -- and since the polls are
essentially identical all the way down to the question wording, we are
treating them as part of the same data series.
The caveat here
is that this poll is about a week old. That ordinarily wouldn't matter
very much, but it does in a week where Obama's national numbers
improved by 4-5 points in about as many days. Still, if David Axelrod
and David Plouffe woke up on election morning and you told them: "this
election is going to come down to _______", one suspects that they'd
rather hear "Colorado" or "Virginia" than Ohio, which was a rough state
for Obama in the primaries.
The couple of Florida polls out look
about where they "should" be. We will see soon if, as I predicted a
week or two ago, Florida eventually surpasses Ohio as a more attractive
pickup target for Obama.
And here are a couple more very
attractive numbers for Obama in Iowa, which now seems to be completely
out of play. On the other hand, John McCain gets good results from ARG
in Virginia and Minnesota, the latter of which Obama is redirecting resources into after abandoning North Dakota.
--Nate Silver