Florida's still swinging

No, the title is not a reference to, for lack of a better term, "geographical anatomy." However, based on the two latest polls on the presidential race, America's Wang™ still could go either way.

Both presidential campaigns can point to new polls that show them ahead in Florida.

SurveyUSA: McCain 49%, Obama 47%

Research 2000: Obama 49%, McCain 45%

The interesting part, as one commenter at the link points out, is the internals on the SUSA poll. They have Obama leading among independents, 47-44, and each has 80% of his own party, yet Huggy Bear has a two-point lead overall? Maybe a little GOP bias in the sample?

Even weirder, SUSA scored it 75-22 for Obama among African-Americans. I'm not saying race has to be a determining factor here, but realistically, how can Huggy be getting 22% among African-Americans? Unless, say, they talked to a disproportionate number of African-American Republicans ...

Bearing out my suspicions, if you drill down even further, you'll see that the overall sample was 44% GOP, 40% Democratic, and 16% independents, in a state where Democrats hold a modest edge of about 41% to 37% over the Republicans in total voter registrations, with 22% registered as independents or with some other affiliation*. Now, granted, many of those Democrats may support Huggy, since historically central and northern Floridians often register as Democrats but vote Republican for president ... but we just don't know that from this poll. We're talking about very small counties anyway, for the most part, so the effect on the poll would -- should -- be minimal.

So we're left with two conclusions: first, take SUSA, or any poll showing Huggy with the lead in Florida, with a grain of salt; and second, we can't let up now. Keep working, keep pushing, keep hustling, right on through November 4. True, Obama doesn't have to win Florida to take the White House ... but it'd be much nicer if we could turn Florida blue.

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* These numbers are based on my own calculations, estimated from 2007 voter registration numbers plus the influx of over 430,000 new registered voters in 2008, some 58% of whom are Democrats. Putting the two together and rounding the numbers just a bit, I estimated:

4,350,000 Democrat
3,900,000 Republican
2,400,000 Independent/Other

for an approximate total of 10,650,000 registered voters in Florida. Again, just an estimate ... but any discrepancy probably would be in the actual tallies rather than in the percentages derived therefrom.