MADISON – In the inaugural Big Ten Battleground Poll taken as the nation’s financial crisis worsened this week, John McCain and Barack Obama were in a statistical dead heat in seven of the eight Midwest states included in the survey.
The individual surveys of 600 randomly selected registered voters in each of the states were conducted by phone from Sept. 14-17 and were co-directed by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientists Charles Franklin and Ken Goldstein and colleagues from participating universities. The polls each have a margin of error of 4 percentage points. The states included in the poll were Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota.