A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney, nationwide, 49%-45%.
But here's an internal that's rarely mentioned and worth keeping an eye on -- how's the president doing with white evangelicals?
In 2008, he picked up 24% of white evangelicals, which was more than John Kerry's 21%, and while many white evangelicals are in strong red states, there are also scores of them in swing states like Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado (El Paso County, home of Colorado Springs).
It's hard to talk with too much certainty about margins in the white evangelical vote, because there aren't a lot of polls breaking it down, but Quinnipiac always includes the question, so here are Romney's four most recent leads: 77%-18%, 72%-18%, 67%-20 and 73%-17%.
So you can see that Romney's support with evangelicals is currently at its highest level, while Obama's remains static in the high teens.
In 2008, McCain beat Obama, 74%-24%, so in today's poll, Romney is overperforming McCain by 3% and Obama is underperforming his 2008 performance by 6%.
The big question, though, isn't necessarily about the margin (which looks better right now for Romney than McCain), but about turnout.
Will evangelicals turn out for a Mormon, everyone's been asking.
Well, if Faith and Freedom Coalition founder, Ralph Reed, has anything to say about it, they'll show up in big numbers. The New York Times had a good read on his efforts recently.
In the coming weeks, he says, each of those 17.1 million registered voters in 15 key states will receive three phone calls and at least three pieces of mail.
Seven million of them will get e-mail and text messages. Two million will be visited by one of more than 5,000 volunteers. Over 25 million voter guides will be distributed in 117,000 churches.
Here's another interesting thing if you dig into the numbers.
Ironically, based on exit polls, a larger percentage of the 2008 electorate was white evangelical (26%) than in 2004 (23%) when George W. Bush had a famously good turnout operation with the group. Who knew.
