http://www.bigtenpoll.org/Obama and McCain in tight race in inaugural Big Ten Battleground Poll
Sept. 18, 2008
In the inaugural Big Ten Battleground Poll taken as the nation’s financial crisis worsened this week, John McCain and Barack Obama were in a statistical dead heat in seven of the eight Midwest states included in the survey.
The individual surveys of 600 randomly selected registered voters in each of the states were conducted by phone from Sept. 14-17 and were co-directed by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientists Charles Franklin and Ken Goldstein and colleagues from participating universities. The polls each have a margin of error of 4 percentage points. The states included in the poll were Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota.
The eight states home to the 11 universities in the Big Ten conference were key battlegrounds in the 2004 election, and the results of the poll show that they are among the most competitive in the country and are likely to be pivotal in determining the election outcome.
The surveys show a tight race in all of the Big Ten states except for Obama’s home state of Illinois, where he holds a 16-point lead over McCain. The two candidates are tied in Iowa and Pennsylvania, and Obama has just a one-point lead in Ohio and Wisconsin. McCain is ahead in just one state — Indiana — where he leads by 4 percentage points.