PPP pro-Obama?

We'll be the first to grant that the polls we've put out in Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia over the last week and a half have all been pretty good news for Barack Obama.

Every single time one of those comes out, I see a variety of comments on blogs to the effect of 'that's good to hear, but don't PPP's numbers always favor Obama?'

The answer is that they actually don't. I think we got that reputation because of our bad poll in Pennsylvania, where we did show Obama doing better much better than he did. But we actually underestimated Obama in eight out of eleven primary polls we did, and in two of the three cases where we did overestimate his final standing it was only by one point.

Now our polls did almost always show Obama doing better than most of the other public polls out at the same time. But that's because in most of the states we polled all of the pollsters underestimated Obama. We just didn't underestimate him as bad as most of our competitors.

Here's the data on this issue:

State	PPP’s Final Poll	Actual Result	Pollster.com Average
South Carolina	Obama +20	Obama +28	Obama +15
Georgia	Obama +16	Obama +36	Obama +14
Tennessee	Clinton +22	Clinton +13	Clinton +22
New York	Clinton +19	Clinton +17	Clinton +19
Wisconsin	Obama +13	Obama +17	Obama +7
Ohio	Clinton +9	Clinton +10	Clinton +6
Texas	Clinton +6	Clinton +4	Clinton +2
Pennsylvania	Obama +3	Clinton +10	Clinton +7
North Carolina	Obama +10	Obama +14	Obama +7
Indiana	Clinton +5	Clinton +2	Clinton +4
Oregon	Obama +19	Obama +18	Obama +13
Average	Obama +1.8	Obama +5.2	Clinton +.4