The New Nation - Internet Edition

Agencies

Democrat Barack Obama widened his lead over Republican John McCain in most national polls and surveys of key states as the U.S. election contest heads into its final full week.

The Illinois senator was up 8 points over presidential rival McCain in an average of 16 polls taken during the last week, according to RealClearPolitics.com. Last week, Obama was up about 6 points. Obama also has built leads in so-called battleground states including Pennsylvania and Ohio and he has an edge over McCain in some states that were Republican strongholds, such as Virginia and North Carolina.

"He had a great week," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Hamden, Connecticut. Speaking of McCain, he said, "No one has come from this far back in this little time." The Gallup Daily election tracking poll shows Obama up 7 points in its national survey. The CBS/New York Times and ABC/Washington Post polls put Obama up 13 points and 9 points respectively, while the latest Newsweek poll shows Obama leading McCain by 12 points.

In North Carolina, which has voted for the Republican candidate in nine of the last 10 elections, Obama and McCain are in a virtual dead heat, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports that has McCain ahead by 2 percentage points and another by Charlotte television station WSOC that has Obama in front by the same margin. In Virginia, four recent polls put Obama in the lead, by an average margin of 7 points.

In Colorado, which went to Republican President George W. Bush in 2004, Obama has taken a 12-point lead over McCain, according to a Rocky Mountain News/CBS4 News poll released late yesterday. The RealClearPolitics.com average of four Colorado polls shows Obama ahead by 7 points.

The Illinois senator has solidified support in the upper Midwest states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan that reliably voted for Democratic presidential candidates, while tying McCain in Indiana, a state that hasn't favored a Democrat since 1964.

Because of Obama's strength in states won by Bush in 2004, McCain now must focus on a limited number of contests for a victory, said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster based in Virginia. "It just makes it more challenging," he said, comparing it to trying to draw an inside straight in poker.