The problem I think that Obama has is that while he may increase AA turnout that may not make up for the loss of white support in lots of states.

Most of his victories came in states with little or no party organization.

This will not be true of any state in the GE.

The metro area, especially very conservative Waukesha County (just west of Milwaukee, fourth reddest county in the country in 2004, very populous from white flighters, fundy Christian) that arose since the primary to force the first AA on the state supreme court off the bench.  And, of course, the Wisconsin primary was before the Wright debacle and more.

* Obama loses support when respondents are asked about potential v.p. match-ups--even McCaskill as v.p. shifts more people to "undecided" in the MO poll, and that's her home state.

My question: Will his poll numbers go down in some of these states after he picks someone for v.p.?

* The gender gap between Obama and McCain voters, while traditional in party voting patterns (more men vote Republican, while women usually vote Dem), is pretty big in polls in MO and OR, particularly OR. (Fortunately for Obama, women vote in greater numbers.)

That said, RCP and 538 both see the state by state polls giving Obama an edge in the Electoral College and show Obama leads growing in MI, OH and PA and movement towards Obama in CO, NM, NV and VA where the polls place the candidates in MOE ties.

So he's sitting on a 7 point aggregate national lead right now, pre-Unity Event, pre-VP selection, pre-Conventions, pre-debates, and pre-major smear effort.  He probably needs to build his lead a little more, have a great convention speech, and head into the final 2 months with an aggregate 15 point lead post-convention to be near-certain of victory.  

This mutes the impact of wackos and inaccurate methodologies ("Mr. Zogby, call for you....") and lessens the impact of the disparate models of turnout, sample selection, sample size and all the other variables that can go in before the pollster starts manipulating the data.  

Break it out state by state, if you want, but give me the Sum Of All Polls.

If you want a "cool" name for it, call it the "Sigma" poll.  The capital Greek letter sigma is, after all, the symbol used in calculus for summing, i.e., to show an integration going on.

Their daily tracking raises questions about the fact that the big-name media polls -- NBC/WSJ, LA Times etc -- show huge leads for Obama.  Or, if not questions about the polls themselves, then questions why the results are so disparate.

Much of the criticism of the media polls has been aimed at the oversampling of Democrats.

Rasmussen today has an interesting article about why their (and Gallup's) daily tracking polls and methodology, esp. as applies to determining voter party identification, is the more dependable way to go.

Most pollsters agree that party identification is one of the strongest indicators of how someone will vote.  However, they disagree about how to determine the right mix of party id and how much it changes over time:

However, the challenge lies in finding the "right" mix of Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters. Some pollsters, including many academic and media pollsters, argue that partisan identification is fluid and changes frequently. This approach suggests that whatever partisan mix falls out from the results of a random sample is the "right" answer. In the case of the recent L.A. Times poll, this mix was 39% Democrats and 22% Republicans.

Polls that use this approach tend to produce a more volatile set of results (during Election 2004, one national firm reported results days apart that showed more than a ten-point swing in voter preference).

Others, including most political polling firms and Rasmussen Reports, argue that people rarely change their partisan affiliation (how many people do you know who consider themselves a Republican one day and a Democrat the next?). This approach produces more stable results.

I have to say, I tend to check the daily polling outfits, and put more weight on them, than the one time media polls, just because unless their methodology is horribly flawed, trends over time seem more dependable than one-time shots.

The problem with state by state polling, which is of course much more important now that EV are what counts, is that there's very little daily polling and (I'm guessing) less reliable party id numbers.  But if I were an Obama supporter, I'd take far more comfort from Rasmussen's stable but moderate lead for him than the one-shot high lead media polls.  Of course those one-shot polls are so much more fun to go into a big celebration over, but they're also more likely to lead to complacency (hello 2000 and 2004), esp. combined with the myth of the no-lose year for Democrats.

What I can't understand is why the polls are consistently interviewing more Dems than Repubs. How far is BO's GOTV working? Are Repubs seriously turned off? Are there really that many more Dems than Repubs?