We have a few new swing state polls today. It should be noted that all of these were done prior to last night's debate. Obama is widely being viewed as the winner of last night's debate, and as I said in my debate review last night, I suspect he'll get a bounce in the polls from getting wavering left-leaning Independents and women back in the fold. It will, however, take at least another day or two to begin to see the impact of the debate on the polls.
That makes today's numbers somewhat lame-duck, but we'll examine them anyway.
* NEVADA: Obama 50%, Romney 47% -- Obama +3% since 1 week ago (Rasmussen)
* NEVADA: Obama 48%, Romney 45% -- Obama +2% since 1 week ago (SurveyUSA)
* NEW HAMPSHIRE: Obama 50%, Romney 49% -- Obama +1% since 1 week ago (Rasmussen)
* WISCONSIN: Obama 49%, Romney 48% -- Romney +10% since 2 weeks ago (Marquette)
Obama obviously got good numbers in Nevada, as both polls showed a 2-3% shift to him. As I've been saying for awhile, Nevada is a key part of Obama's path to 270 electoral votes, and forms one of his "firewall" states along with Ohio and Iowa. Romney still has not led in a single poll of Nevada all year. I had New Hampshire in that firewall category a few weeks ago, but it's looking very tight at the moment. Romney got a very strong number in Wisconsin, but again, even at his highest point, Romney has been unable to take the lead in Wisconsin, meaning the slightest shift back to Obama would revert the state to a fairly comfortable shade of blue. With Obama's debate win last night, I'd expect states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to revert back closer to where they were three weeks ago. It's no different than what my view of North Carolina has been -- Obama was not able to take an average lead in the state even at his highest point, so it was always questionable whether he could win there in this electoral environment. You can't assume that either candidate is going to produce his absolute all-time best-case results in any state on election day, the reality is usually somewhere closer to the averages.
A lot is being made about today's Gallup tracking poll which shows Romney up by 6%. I would urge folks not to make too much of the poll, and the reasoning is pretty simple -- all the tracking polls are showing wildly different results and they're all worthless now until they begin to include data after last night's debate. While Gallup shows Romney up 6%, RAND shows Obama up 4%, Reuters shows Obama up 3%, IBD/TIPP shows Obama up 2%, Rasmussen shows Romney up just 1%, etc. The end result when you average all the national polls together is a 0.4% lead for Romney, which is actually down slightly from yesterday. In other words, the national polls are saying exactly the same thing they've been saying for days -- the national race is essentially tied. And that is prior to last night's debate. I'm more interested in seeing the overall average move one way or the other than individual polls that seem like outliers from the other polls. It's when the overall average moves that you know something has changed -- as I demonstrated yesterday in my article comparing Romney's poll averages on October 3rd compared to his poll averages yesterday.
We'll need to wait until at least Friday or so before we start to get at least some concrete data on how the public digested last night's debate. The data we do have -- post-debate instant polls from CBS, CNN, ABC, Public Policy, and Lake Research -- all showed that people thought Obama won the debate. That would point to him gaining in national and state polls taken after the debate, but we won't know for sure until we get some.
It's also worth noting that the time period right after a major event (convention speeches, debates, etc.) tend to be very volatile for polling and produce wild results. We saw this in polls taken immediately after the first debate, and we could see it again in polls taken immediately after the second.