Here’s one that should have John McCain feeling pretty good about life:
That shows McCain with a 9-point lead over Hillary Clinton in the Show-Me State, and a 15-point lead over Obama. This is the second straight Missouri poll that has shown Obama trailing by mid-double digits in the state — he was down by 14 in Survey USA’s latest — as well as Clinton’s worst result in Missouri of any poll this cycle.
It may be time to stop speaking of Missouri as a bellwether state. It seems to be moving in the opposite direction of a state like Virginia; as Virginia becomes more ‘Northern’, Missouri becomes more ‘Southern’. It has now dropped entirely off of Obama’s Swing State list — our model thinks he’d be better off investing resources in a state like North Carolina or Nebraska — and is not much higher than Tennessee on Clinton’s list.
On the other hand, maybe that’s just a convenient excuse for the Democrats, considering that they won a big victory there in 2006 in the US Senate race. It does seem like the Jeremiah Wright flap has hurt Obama more in the South than elsewhere; it also seems to have rubbed off on Clinton more in the South than elsewhere, perhaps because of a backlash among black voters.