Morning Polls

Not much movement in the trackers this morning. Gallup went from Obama +6 to Obama +4. Rasmussen holds steady at Obama +6. Hotline moves from Obama +6 to Obama +5. R2000 holds steady at Obama +10. Democracy Corps has a national poll out that has Obama up by 4. Pew has a poll out that has Obama up by 6. Yesterday afternoon, ABC/WP came out with their poll putting Obama up by 4. Time has Obama up by 7 and a Bush Approval rating as low as 23%.

Franklin and Marshall has Obama up by 7 in PA this morning. I don’t see why so many sites have PA as a tossup state right now. It just isn’t. Then, there’s this …

The big polling story of the morning is the Quinnipiac polls in PA, OH, and FL. In short, it is hard to believe they are right so don’t get excited. Here they are:

Pennsylvania	Quinnipiac	Obama 54, McCain 39	Obama +15
Ohio	Quinnipiac	Obama 50, McCain 42	Obama +8
Florida	Quinnipiac	Obama 51, McCain 43	Obama +8

Nate Silver, for what it’s worth, argues Quinnipiac might be close to correct even if they have a 1-2 point Dem lean. Here’s his take this morning on them:

The McCain camp is going a little crazy over these polls. Usually, when a campaign does something like that, it's worried about morale. But do their complaints have any basis in fact?

Quinnipiac's polls have shown a slight Democratic lean this cycle -- they've been 1-2 points more favorable to Dems than contemporaneous polls of their states. From what I can tell, their head of polling (Peter Brown) has fairly conservative politics, so I don't know that it can be called a partisan lean. But that is the side that the polls have tended to end up upon nevertheless.

At the same time, they are highly-rated polls, use large sample sizes, and have plenty of rich trendlines for comparison. Is it possible that they are outliers to a certain degree? Possibly -- maybe even probably -- but as I intimated yesterday, with Obama's surge nationally it was inevitable that we were eventually going to get an oh sh*t set of state polling for Obama. There clearly seems to have been some movement toward Obama in Florida, as well as in Pennsylvania, where the Morning Call tracker has had him gaining a point literally every day since its inception. Ohio, I am somewhat less convinced about, but InsiderAdvantage also gives him the lead there (as well as a 6-point lead in Virginia).

I love it. In short, these are what he calls “an oh shit set of state polling.” It’s a technical term.