The polls suggest that each state is being whipsawed by the contradictory forces that have shaped this year's campaign from the outset. The Times Poll, supervised by Polling Director Susan Pinkus, was conducted in the three states from Friday to Sunday. The overarching message of the surveys is that voters remain so closely divided between Bush and Gore in these states that even small shifts in the campaign's last week could be decisive.
Some common threads run through all three states.
Bush has a big lead among rural voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan but not in Florida, where some vestiges of the Southern rural conservative Democratic tradition survive. Voters in all three states express more confidence in Gore's intelligence, experience and capacity to handle a crisis, but pluralities in Florida and Pennsylvania consider Bush more honest. Michigan is the best of the three states for Gore largely because the Democratic base is more unified behind the vice president than in the other two battlegrounds. Despite the overall closeness of the contest in Pennsylvania, the survey pinpoints some worrisome signs there for Gore. The most worrisome news for Gore is that Pennsylvania independents tend to break toward Bush on these questions much more than the population overall.