I'm short on time today, so let's keep this on point: John McCain is in
deep trouble. In spite of some incremental gains that McCain has made
in some of the national tracking polls,
the set of state polling that follows is so strong for Obama that he
continues to hit record marks in all three of our projection metrics.
We are now projecting Obama to win the election 90.5 percent of the
time, with an average of 346.8 electoral votes, and a 5.4-point margin
in the national popular vote.
There
simply isn't any good news in here for John McCain (all right, he's
kicking butt in Oklahoma). The only swing state poll that he leads is
the SurveyUSA result in North Carolina, but even there, Obama has
bounced back from a 20-point deficit in a SuvreyUSA poll taken shortly
after the Republican Convention.
Moreover, Obama's position in
the electoral vote remains even stronger than his position in the
popular vote. We project him to win all of John Kerry's states by at
least 6.9 points (New Hampshire remains the weakest link). We also
project him to win Iowa by 12.5 points, New Mexico by 7.7, Virginia by
7.3 and Colorado by 6.9. Getting this race back to a tie might not be
sufficient for John McCain; he might need to pull ahead by 1 or even 2
points nationally to mitigate Obama's edge in the battleground states.
--Nate Silver