Breathe easier folks. The Granite State will not be as hard to crack as a few recent polls have led us to believe. This new poll hot off the presses shows Obama leading 51-45 (with leaners) (48-45 without leaners).
http://www.maristpoll.marist.edu/...
Obama gets a whopping 96% of Democratic voters (consistent with the overall national trend reported in the ABC-WAPO poll). McCain gets 87% of the GOP vote.
Obama leads among Indies 54-38 (another trend consistent with the ABC/WAPO poll).
Good news. A return to sanity in polling.
I've attached the poll link. Have at it.
[UPDATE #1]: I've read a lot of comments questioning the Marist Poll as Marist isn't very highly ranked. Here is some added perspective on NH. There have been four legitimate polls taken for NH in September. Obama leads by 6 points in two polls (CNN/Time + Marist) and McCain leads by 2 in two polls (UNH + Ras). Average them together and you get Obama up +2. Zogby Interactive released a poll favoring McCain which is skewing the pollster.com average. I disregard Zogby Interactive as I'm sure most folks do.
The UNH poll had a GOP +7 preference and they broke down their sample in half, asking two different questions. If the election were held today, Obama led 46-45. The other sample was asked whom they would vote for if they were to think about what they would do in November (as opposed to today): McCain led 40-39 with a high undecided. Somehow, they shuffled the overall number to come up with a 47-45 McCain lead which does not look very credible to me. Marist's internals look pretty standard and happen to be consistent with the trend picked up by ABC/WAPO, CNN and CBS/NYT nationally. The other thing to note is that the difference in vote registration between Dems and Republicans has narrowed sharply to about 1%. (I believe in 2004 the difference was closer to 6%). Also keep in mind that Kerry still won the state in spite of the GOP registration advantage in 2004 and NH has trended more Dem in statewide and federal elections in this decade than before. There is every reason to believe that if Obama is up 9 nationally, he is up in a Kerry state like NH by at least 2 points.
As for Ras, I know a lot of folks think he's credible, but I would say he has a clear GOP lean. He does well in Republican years, not so well in Democratic years. This is a Democratic year.