Today we see yet more evidence of the recent national gains for the Obama-Biden ticket trickling down to individual states. Seventeen new statewide polls released yesterday moved our estimates in Obama's direction in eight states. They also pushed the battleground states of Colorado and Florida into the "lean Obama" category, raising his electoral vote lead on our map to 296 to 163, with 79 electoral votes still in the toss-up category. More specifically,
- Two new polls by Fox News/Rasmussen and the Florida Chamber of Commerce serve to confirm and extend the trend toward Obama, increasing his margin on the trend estimate to four points (49.3% to 45.3%). Although the Chamber poll shows a three-point McCain advantage (45% to 42%), the Rasmussen survey gave Obama a 7-point lead (52% to 45%) and five of the last six Florida polls give Obama leads of 4 to 8 points.
- In Colorado, the new Fox News/Rasmussen poll puts Obama ahead by six (51% to 45%), though note that Fox/Rasmussen has conducted two of the three Colorado polls released since the first debate.
Elsewhere, yesterday's polls also helped move the trend estimates in Obama's direction in Virgnia (+1.9), New Hampshire (+1.4), North Carolina (+0.9) and Ohio (+0.8) and Maine (+0.4). The exception is New Mexico, where a new survey by the Albuquerque Journal, showing Obama leading by just five points (45% to 40%) narrowed the trend estimate slightly (-0.3).
The changes we continue to see at the state level are likely the result of the lag resulting from less frequent polling conducted in individual states. At the national level, we have evidence that the Obama surge is leveling off over the last few days. We logged 10 new national surveys yesterday (5 daily trackers plus 5 new stand-alone polls) and the net effect was a slight narrowing of the national margin. Obama's seven point lead (49.9% to 42.9% as of this writing) is still nearly double that recorded a week ago (+4.2), but the lead has essentially leveled off over the weekend and is down slightly from the 7.9 margin we logged on Sunday.
Still, seven of the yesterday's new national surveys tracked previous surveys from the same pollster completed since September 30. Five the the seven showed a gain of at least a point for Obama. The two exceptions were Diageo/Hotline (no change since their last non-overlapping sample) and CBS News (a one-point narrowing of Obama's lead among likely voters).
Update: These estimates do not reflect the just released CNN/Time surveys in Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin