Today's Polls: Trouble on the Home Front

For the first time since shortly after clinching the Democratic nomination, we now have Barack Obama as less than a 60 percent favorite to win the election. Our simulations presently project Obama to win the election 58.4 percent of the time, with McCain winning the remaining 41.6 percent.The main culprit for the decline are the new numbers out of Ohio, where Rasmussen shows John McCain jumping into a 10-point lead. We have already discussed this particular poll at length. Are the changes caused by differences in measuring party identification? No, not really. Rasmussen assumes a slightly redder electorate than other pollsters, but Obama's numbers had declined among Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike. Could there be problems related to the sampling of young voters in this survey, who went surprisingly strongly for... [read full story]