Pennsylvania, Part XVII

Two new polls out this week spell doom for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania!

The latest NBC/Mason-Dixon poll has it Obama 47, McCain 43, and the most recent Strategic Vision poll has it Obama 49, McCain 44!

Now, as you know by now, I believe that polls, especially averaged together, present a highly accurate picture of the current state of public opinion, so I definitely do not dismiss these polls out of hand. But neither do I dismiss the other polls that came out the contemporaneously with these. CNN/Time, for example, released a poll on Wednesday that has Obama at 55% and McCain at 43%. Muhlenberg, which is running a daily tracking poll in Pennsylvania, pegs Obama at 53%, almost exactly the same as it has been for more than three weeks.

For a better view, let's take a look at our rolling five-day average of polls:



There seems to be no doubt that over the last 12 days, McCain's support has trended upward. In fact, on our graph here, McCain hit bottom on October 16, with only 39.25% support. Since then, however, he has picked up nearly 3 points, bringing him up to 42%. This is totally unsurprising. Even though McCain has run a pretty subpar campaign in an environment that is very hostile for Republicans, it is nevertheless very hard to imagine him winning less than 43 or 44% of the vote in a state where George W. Bush twice broke 47%.

Indeed, what I find more telling about this graph is that, for the past 10 days or so, Obama's support has also been ticking upwards, though at a slower pace than McCain's. He's gained about a point and a half since the 19th of October. Since McCain and Obama are both gaining, that suggests that undecideds are coming off the fence. The troubling thing for McCain is that, contrary to his pollster's hope, they are not breaking exclusively for McCain. In fact, over the past ten days, as the percentage of undecideds dropped by by four points, McCain seems to have gotten about 60% of them. That rate will definitely help make the final margin in Pennsylvania closer than the current ten point gap, but it will not be enough.

One last piece of eye-candy for you. Here's a graph which just shows the margin by which the Democratic candidate is leading in the rolling 5 day average.



It does seem clear that McCain made a little headway after he made it known that he was going to vigorously contest Pennsylvania, but since then, not a whole lot of movement in his direction, and a lot of ground to make up. Notice also that in 2004, the final margin was basically spot on.