Spin Cycle

Quinnipiac issued some battleground polls this morning that seem too good to be true for Obama -- a 15 point lead in Pennsylvania, and an 8-point lead in Florida and Ohio. You can look here, but with all the national tracking polls showing Obama with a lead of around 5 points, it's hard to believe that he's broken away in three big battlegrounds.

Both the McCain and Obama campaigns are downplaying these polls. Contra, however, the polling site fivethirtyeight.com says the Q findings certainly capture a trend:

"Quinnipiac's polls have shown a slight Democratic lean this cycle -- they've been 1-2 points more favorable to Dems than contemporaneous polls of their states. From what I can tell, their head of polling (Peter Brown) has fairly conservative politics, so I don't know that it can be called a partisan lean. But that is the side that the polls have tended to end up upon nevertheless.

"At the same time, they are highly-rated polls, use large sample sizes, and have plenty of rich trendlines for comparison. Is it possible that they are outliers to a certain degree? Possibly -- maybe even probably -- but as I intimated yesterday, with Obama's surge nationally it was inevitable that we were eventually going to get an oh sh*t set of state polling for Obama. There clearly seems to have been some movement toward Obama in Florida, as well as in Pennsylvania, where the Morning Call tracker has had him gaining a point literally every day since its inception. Ohio, I am somewhat less convinced about, but InsiderAdvantage also gives him the lead there (as well as a 6-point lead in Virginia)."