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When is a 2.2% McCain lead bigger than a 13.8% Obama lead? Why, when the Washington Post is reporting it, of course! Chris Bowers checks out their "Political Landscape" page and notes some real weirdness:
Obama +13.8%: Battleground state (PA)Obama +10.4%: Battleground state (NH)Obama +10.0%: Battleground state (NJ)Obama +9.5%: Battleground state (IA)Obama +9.0%: Battleground state (OR)Obama +8.2%: Battleground state (MN)Obama +8.2%: Battleground state (MI)Obama +8.8%: Battleground state (WI)Obama +7.3%: Battleground state (NM)McCain +6.8%: Leaning Republican (GA)Obama +5.1%: Battleground state (VA)Obama +4.0%: Battleground state (CO)McCain +3.8%: Leaning Republican (IN)Obama +3.5%: Battleground state (OH)Obama +3.1%: Battleground state (FL)Obama +3.0%: Battleground state (NV)McCain +2.2%: Leaning Republican (WV)States where Obama leads by double digits are "battlegrounds," while places that favor McCain by a handful of percentage points "lean Republican." Bowers calls this "as blatantly imbalanced as election reporting can possibly get," and he's right. Objective reporting is a hard gig, but if you can't objectively report numbers, you're really in trouble. Even so, what you're seeing here is not bias towards conservatism, but towards conventional wisdom. Reporters are used to thinking of places like Pennsylvania and Iowa as toss-ups. They don't think that way about places like Georgia and West Virginia. Of course Democrats can't win those places. So they simply refuse to believe what the numbers are telling them. They are objectively reporting the consensus of the profession.
