The ABC/Washington Post and SUSA polls out today seem to show Viginia moving firmly into the Obama column. Both show him following in the electoral geographic and demographic footsteps of the elections for Governor of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and for Senator Webb. 
      The key for a Republican to win statewide in the last 10 years or so is to get a huge margin in the Shenandoah Valley to offset N VA. A Democrat just needed to get 40% in the Valley and anything above that started a move towards landslide.  SUSA had a breakdown for the Valley with Obama at 40%, 14 points behind McCain. The racists in the Valley are somewhat open about it so I do not think there is a "Bradley effect" here. The ABC/Post poll did not have a specific Valley breakout, but, from their descriptions of regional breakouts, it appears that it is safe to assert that Obama is at 40% in the Valley. I suspect that there may be a "hidden" Obama vote there by folks who for social reasons do not want to admit they are voting "for one of them."
    Both polls showed Obama off the map in N VA.
    Obama has a nice 10 point lead in the Hampton Roads area which has a very large active duty and retiree military community. This seems to "ratify" my surmise that military families are going to give Obama more votes than they usually give a Democratic Presidential candidate for several reasons: the strain of repeated deployments; McCain's opposition, and Obama's support, for the Webb GI Bill of Rights; somewhere between 30% and 40% of active duty military enlisted personnel are African-American or Hispanic; and, for the wives, the way McCain dumped his first wife which is especially well-known among Navy families.
    The Richmond area gave McCain a slight margin but I suspect that both polls are under-estimating the African-American vote and turnout in Richmond and Petersburg.
    Statewide, the demographic breakout by age refected the trends in the national tracking polls which made such a breakout available. Obama has taken the lead nationally, and in VA, in the Boomer group (40-65) where he had trailed since the spring. These are the 401(k) and IRA folks who think they want to retire soemtime. To get an idea why they may have moved to Obama just consider this: a rough, but quite accurate, guage of how 401(k)'s have done since January 20, 2001 is to look at the S&P 500 index number on that date and compare it to Friday (Friday was an up day for the market and within the polling timeframe) after adjusting for inflation as measured by the CPI. The answer is that it was less than it was in 2001. 
     These two polls provide enough information to show that Obama is hitting all the metrics he needs to hit to carry VA.  I suspect that both may under-estimate his vote. Will this continue for the next six weeks? All I can say, at this point in VA, I would rather be Obama than McCain.