Polls say McCain may even lose his home state

According to the latest polls, John McCain is in danger of losing states that are traditionally Republican strongholds. Most worrying for the Arizona senator, he could even see his home state fall into Barack Obama's hands. Both the Cronkite/Eight poll and the Zimmerman poll have McCain only two points ahead of Obama in Arizona - well within the margin of error.

Anne Ryman on the Arizona Republic points out that though there are 1.1m registered Republicans in Arizona, some 824,000 independents are leaning towards Obama. By contrast with McCain, Obama's lead in his home state of Illinois is almost 30 per cent according to some pollsters.

Montana is also getting too close for comfort from a Republican point of view. A new Mason-Dixon/NBC poll shows Obama only four points behind McCain in a state that has not voted Democrat since Clinton's landslide in 1992. The Republicans have been forced to counter with anti-Obama advertising, including one radio ad (below) which goes: "We love our God, and we love our guns. And we resent it when liberals like Obama question our way of life. Don't be bitter, vote McCain."

Meanwhile, Obama is ahead of McCain by 7.3 per cent on average in Virginia, the state where McCain has his campaign headquarters and where no Democrat has won since 1964. Robert Barnes for the Washington Post reports that when Obama visited deeply conservative Harrisonburg yesterday he reminded 20,000 supporters that the last Democratic candidate to visit the city was Stephen Douglas – who was running against Abraham Lincoln.

Obama has one more trip to Virginia planned before the election, meaning he will have made ten visits to the state since his Democratic nomination. According to Jay Newton-Small at Time, Obama's lead in the state can be attributed to a Democratic drive to register black voters who comprise some 20 per cent of Virginia's population.

Overall, this morning's AP polls give Obama the lead in six crucial swing states - Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. The same polls show that the vital races for North Carolina and Florida are still too close to call.

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 29, 2008