The Night's Watch

Your end-of-the-day polling round-up

by

Seven swing state polls came out today and each showed President Obama with a decisive advantage over Mitt Romney, making this a bad start to the week for the Republican presidential nominee.

In Colorado, Public Policy Polling gives Obama a six-point lead over Romney. In Michigan, Rasmussen puts Obama 12 points ahead of Romney, 54 to 42, which is similar to the results in Wisconsin, where We Ask America gives Obama a double-digit lead, 53 to 41. According to the latest polls from American Research Group, Obama is ahead by seven points in Iowa and Nevada, and by 5 points in Florida, 50–45. Finally, the conservative Civitas Institute released a survey of North Carolina, which found Obama with a four-point lead over the former Massachusetts governor, 49 percent to 45 percent.

If you're unconvinced that the race isn't a toss-up, keep in mind that Obama is leading in every single national poll. Even pollsters with Republican-friendly results, like Rasmussen, show a race that has broken in favor of the incumbent:

There isn't much time left in the election, and we're reaching the point where polls become highly predictive-as Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien note in The Timeline of Presidential Elections, the candidate who leads at this point in the race almost always goes on to win on election day. Barring a major exogenous event-like economic collapse in Europe-Romney faces extremely long odds for the White House.

A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.

Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.

You can help power this newsroom by making a one-time donation or by becoming a member today.