SurveyUSA has released a whole bunch of data within the past 24 hours related to the series of Vice Presidential surveys they conducted last week:
The result that has gotten the most buzz is Obama’s +2 in Missouri. What’s a little bit unusual is that SurveyUSA appears to have conducted a second Missouri poll over the same period, which included Senator Clinton’s numbers rather than the VP matchups. So far as I can tell, these are completely separate polls (they have different sample sizes, for instance) and so we will continue to list both of them. And really, they’re close enough to one another that it probably isn’t worth sweating the difference; both point toward Missouri being competitive in November. With that said, those who argue that Obama performs better when Hillary Clinton’s name isn’t mentioned in the survey could point to this as evidence.
Obama’s numbers out on the Pacific Coast look very good, as they have been in almost all polling recently. On the other hand, McCain is a bit closer than expected in Minnesota and Massachusetts, but that has been a consistent facet of SurveyUSA polling in those states. SurveyUSA polls appear to be less hewed to party identification than those of most other agencies, so just as they tend to show Obama polling a bit closer in red states like Nebraska, they also tend to show McCain more competitive in certain blue states.