Patriot Update

For all of the talk this year about party-ID breakdowns in polling (of which I am guilty myself), there is an underlying statistic that should have Team Obama extremely worried about their prospects: Mitt Romney leads with independents in every single national poll.

This is no small feat — in 2008 President Obama took independents by 8 percent. Today Romney’s lead with independents is, on average, 8.3 percent. That’s based on ten current national polls that provide independent head-to-head numbers (Gallup and UPI are the only two that do not): The 8.3 percentage lead with independents helps to overcome the 4.5 percent sample advantage Democrats have in those same polls, which is the reason Romney is able to scratch out a razor thin .2 percent lead.