Polls suggest Obama could be on course for landslide victory

Largely overshadowed by media coverage of tonight's US Senate vote on the rescue package for America's banking industry, a batch of opinion polls released today show a striking shift of support away from John McCain and towards Barack Obama, which could mark a decisive turning point in this year's presidential campaign.

New polls from InsiderAdvantage/PollPosition, CNN/Time, Suffolk/WSVN and Quinnipiac show Obama leading in the state of Florida by an average of 5%, a notable turnaround considering the widely consulted Realclearpolitics (RCP) average of polls gave McCain a lead of 2% in that state as recently as last Thursday.

Perhaps even more worrying for the McCain campaign, CNN/Time now has Obama leading by 9% in Virginia, a state which no Republican has failed to win since 1964. Other polls published today show Obama ahead in Nevada for the first time in over a month, and up by between 7% and 15% in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota, three states that were until recently considered to be competitive contests.

These new poll numbers will send alarm bell ringing at the McCain campaign headquarters. Needing 270 electoral votes (EVs) to win the presidency, according to RCP Obama now leads by at least 5% in all the states John Kerry won in 2004, with the exception of New Hampshire (where he leads by just 1%). He also leads in Iowa and New Mexico, two states that voted Republican in 2004, by 6% and 8% respectively.

The Kerry states, minus New Hampshire and plus Iowa and New Mexico are worth 260 EVs, leaving Senator Obama just 10 EVs short of the magic total of 270. He could get these by winning some combination of the battleground states of Florida (worth 27 EVs), Ohio (20 EVs), North Carolina (15 EVs), Virginia (13 EVs), Colorado (9 EVs), Nevada (5 EVs) and New Hampshire (4 EVs).

Obama currently leads in all seven of these states (by between 0.5% and 3.5% according to RCP) and is also only !% behind McCain in Missouri (11 EVs) and 2% behind in Indiana (11 EVs), suggesting a landslide electoral vote total of over 350 may be within reach.

What has been the cause of McCain's fall in the polls ? Firstly the 'Palin bounce' appears to be receding. According to the Rasmussen national tracking poll, McCain trailed Obama by 4% on August 29th. By September 12th, following the announcement of Palin as McCain's vice presidential running mate and her subsequent speech at the Republican National Convention, McCain was 3% ahead. This lead has now disappeared completely, with McCain currently 6% behind Obama according to Rasmussen.

Amidst widespread criticism of her performance in interviews with both ABC News (in which she was unable to explain the Bush Doctrine) and CBS News (in which she gave a rambling incoherent answer to a question about the proposed bailout package for financial institutions, defended her assertion that Alaska's proximity to Russia gave her foreign policy credentials and was unable to name a newspaper or magazine that she consulted to inform herself on world events), Palin was lampooned on popular US comedy show Saturday Night Live as a hick ingenue out of her depth (see clips here and here.)

According to the Diageo/Hotline three day tracking poll, her favourability rating has dropped from 51% favourable, 29% unfavourable (a net favourability of 22%) on Sep 12th to 45% favourable, 41% unfavourable (a net favourability of just 4%) on October 1st. Meanwhile Pew Research Center reported on October 1st that just 37% of respondents to their poll now believed Palin was qualified to be President, down from 52% in early September.

The second reason behind Obama's surge in the polls is the current financial crisis, which appears to be boosting support for the Democrats. A CNN poll released on September 22nd showed that 47% of registered voters blamed the Republicans for the economic turmoil, compared to just 24% who blamed the Democrats. A poll by Pew Research Center a week later (conducted after Obama's strong performance on economic issues in the presidential debate) showed 46% of respondents thought Obama would be better at dealing with the financial crisis compared to 33% who chose McCain.

All of these polling figures will be a cause of great concern for McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis. Media focus over the last week has been concentrated on the financial turmoil on Wall Street, but with just 34 days remaining before the election on November 4th, John McCain's campaign for president appears to be in no less a state of crisis than the US economy.