Sunday Swing State Polls Analysis: FL, National

Only one new swing state poll today, but a few notes on the national numbers.

* FLORIDA: Romney 48%, Obama 47% — No change from 1 week ago (Public Policy)

The Florida number is more or less in line with what we’ve been seeing in the state, which right now looks close, but with an advantage to Romney.

* IBD/TIPP: Obama +6% (48%-42%)
* NBC/WSJ/Marist RV: Obama +5% (49%-44%)
* NBC/WSJ/Marist LV: TIE (47%-47%)
* Public Policy: TIE (48%-48%)
* Rasmussen: Romney +2% (49%-47%)
* Gallup RV: Romney +3% (49%-46%)
* Gallup LV: Romney +7% (52%-45%)

The big number today is the new NBC/WSJ/Marist national poll which has the race tied. As I’ve been saying for a few days, the easiest way to get around the apparent outliers like the IBD/TIPP poll showing Obama up 6% and the Gallup poll showing Romney up 7% is to average all these daily polls together. What we’ve had for the past few days is a virtual tie, and the NBC/WSJ/Marist poll falls in line with that. As usual, we continue to see a large gap between the registered voter models and the likely voter models, as the NBC/WSJ poll has Obama up 5% among RV, and tied among LV.

This sets up what I’ve been hammering home in these updates for a week or so — this is going to be a very close, 2004-style election that will be determined by turnout and which campaign has the better ground game operation. Obama’s ground game was universally acclaimed as very strong in 2008, that helped him overperform the polling averages in almost every swing state. Signs indicate that Romney’s ground operation is better than John McCain’s was in 2008, but McCain had a very poor operation so that isn’t saying much. Obama dwarfs Romney in the number of field offices in swing states but that is obviously only one variable. Romney’s ground game has had a pretty mixed record in the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries where he often underperformed poll numbers. The difference is that in the general election environment, he has the resources of the entire Republican party, the third party groups supporting him (particularly Karl Rove who has experience building tremendous ground operations), etc. Unfortunately it is difficult to gauge these types of things until we see the results. What we do have so far in terms of measures of strength for ground game operations is early voting in states like Iowa, Ohio, and North Carolina, where Obama is currently outpacing 2008 early voting turnout.