Barack Obama is leading John McCain in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota, according to a new Big Ten Battleground Poll. "Obama is clearly winning the Big Ten battleground," says Charles Franklin of Pollster.com. The results:
As the race for the White House enters its final days, the Big Ten Battleground Poll shows Barack Obama holds significant leads over John McCain in eight crucial Midwest states.
The individual surveys of between 562 and 586 randomly selected registered voters and those likely to register to vote before the election in each of the states were conducted by phone with live interviewers from Oct. 19-22 and were co-directed by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientists Charles Franklin and Ken Goldstein with the cooperation of colleagues from participating Big Ten universities. The polls each have a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points. The states included in the poll were Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota, home to the 11 universities in the Big Ten conference.
Those states were key battlegrounds in the 2004 election, and last month the Big Ten Battleground Poll showed a tight race in all of those states but Illinois, which Obama represents in the U.S. Senate. The first poll was taken just as the U.S. financial crisis first intensified and before the massive decline in the stock market, when McCain was enjoying his highest poll numbers of the campaign in the Big Ten and nationally.
"In September, we saw virtually the entire Big Ten as a battleground," said Franklin, co-developer of Pollster.com. "Now Obama is clearly winning the Big Ten battleground. The dominance of the economy as a top issue for voters is the overwhelming story."
The new Big Ten poll shows Obama ahead in every Big Ten state, including Indiana, where McCain held a slight edge in September, and Ohio and Pennsylvania, where last month's poll results showed the two candidates in a dead heat.
Time magazine's latest poll finds that Obama leads in Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia -- four states won by Bush in 2004. Their results show that McCain's latest attacks aren't having much of an impact:
The polls also suggest that the McCain campaign's recent attempts to link the Democratic nominee to former domestic terrorist William Ayers and the liberal organizing group ACORN (which the GOP accuses of perpetrating voter fraud) are not resonating with most voters. ... Although a majority of voters in Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina had heard of Ayers and ACORN, less than a third of voters said such issues would affect their votes.