grab for Obama considering that even John Edwards, a native of the state, couldn’t help Kerry beat Bush there in 2004.
With 20 electoral votes, a candidate has never won the White House without Ohio. A Reuters/Zogby poll today had Obama up in Ohio by five points, and three other recent surveys also have shown him in the lead. Another has McCain leading by three points.
Recent Zogby polls are not very consistent and sometimes award Obama with the lead and other times McCain. Given the margin of error of 2.9% these leads may be immaterial. Nevertheless, Obama has a noticeable lead in Colorado with nine electoral votes, Pennsylvania (21), Indiana (11) and Wisconsin (10).
The campaigns have placed McCain and Palin and Obama and Biden in different swing states in order to cover more ground. Biden will spend the rest of the week in Florida talking to supporters and undecided voters in Melbourne, Ocala, and Jupiter. Sen. Hillary Clinton will be in Manchester and Pelham, New Hampshire on Tuesday, a state that she lost to Obama during the Primaries.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows Obama attracting 51% of the vote and John McCain with 46%. Obama’s five-point advantage (+/- 2% at a 95% confidence level) is down from an eight-point lead yesterday but up a point from the lead he held a week ago.
Over the weekend an additional 35 more newspapers endorsed Barack Obama, bringing the current total number of endorsements to over 190. Key endorsements included one from the Anchorage Daily News, vice presidential contender Palin’s own state. McCain came out of the weekend with 82.
As the candidates move into the last full week of the election it seems both candidates have agreed to place more emphasis on the economy, which will likely be the deciding issue for voters who seem averse to the negative campaign ads that were distributed over the last two weeks.
Marcia A. Wade is a reporter at BlackEnterprise.com