Bush surges in South, flat in Midwest, according to R internals?

[Hegemon]

FWIW, on CNN tonight after the Bush speech, a Wall Street Journal reporter stated that the Republicans' internal polling this week has shown a Bush surge in the south, but no real gains in the midwest battlegrounds.  

[Hegemon]

FWIW, on CNN tonight after the Bush speech, a Wall Street Journal reporter stated that the Republicans' internal polling this week has shown a Bush surge in the south, but no real gains in the midwest battlegrounds.  

No reporter would ever get within 200 miles of the internal polls.

Really?  Not even guys like David Broder, Charlie Cook or Ron Faucheux?

[Hegemon]

OK, the transcript of the show is up on CNN.com now.  Here is what the WSJ guy (national political editor), said:

JOHN HARWOOD, "WALL STREET JOURNAL": I don't think it did Aaron. In fact I don't think the race is fundamentally changed since before the Democratic convention. Republican polls over the first three nights of the convention that I was told of this afternoon showed movement for President Bush in southern states but not movement in some of the Midwest states. That suggests that maybe some of his base, particularly white men, is coming back to him, but it may not be working in the battleground states and one thing we have to keep in mind, all of these polls may be more difficult to interpret this year because both parties are doing so much to change the composition of the electorate, we don't know who's going to turn out.


So he's not talking about a national tracking poll, but individual state polls.  The Republicans might not be doing polls of Alabama, but aren't they polling Arkansas, and perhaps Virigina and North Carolina? And of course the Florida panhandle is fundamentally southern, unlike the the rest of the state, and they're certainly getting polilng data from there.