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If Obama leads nationally by a couple of points, he does not trail by 5 or 6 in Florida. That's crap.
Nate Silver at 538 insists Obama is lagging in Florida by 6 points from his national figure. That's true only if you're dunce enough to accept state polls at face value without logical application.
Florida in the 2004 exit poll had 20% self-identified liberals and 34% conservatives. In the 2006 senate exit poll it was 20/33. That's the definition of a swing state. It's basically 1% more conservative than the nation as a whole.
Obama may have slight demographic weakness in Florida compared to what Hillary would have managed or a generic Democratic nominee, but it doesn't translate to 5 or 6 points.
It continues to boggle my mind that the liberal/conservative percentages are completely ignored by analysts who should know better, and who supposedly look for mathematical guidelines. There is nothing more predictive than those percentages. Again, in '00 and '04 Gore and Kerry won every state with at least 24% liberals. Bush won every state with at least 35% conservatives. It was something like 86-0.
You can use numbers like that to confidently assert Indiana is not a swing state, and Florida is not out of play.
Mason-Dixon is a reputable pollster, one of the ones I've respected most since studying this stuff beginning in '96. I always place great weight in their numbers and SurveyUSA. SurveyUSA has strange breakdowns on individual characteristic like the black vote due to extremely low numbers in the sample which can skew percentages, but somehow it manages to knit together for an accurate forecast.
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