A new Columbus Dispatch poll suggests Barack Obama may be leading John McCain by as much as 36 points among Asian Americans in Ohio. Sixty-five percent of respondents in the poll’s “Asian/other” category back Obama, to just 29% for McCain. 

Obama also leads overwhelmingly among other voters of color, with a 44-point advantage among Latino voters and with 91% of the African American vote. McCain gets only a 4-point advantage among white voters. As a result, Obama holds a solid overall lead in Ohio, drawing 52% of the vote to McCain’s 46%.

More good news for Democrats: Among those who say they have already voted by absentee ballot, Obama holds an even bigger lead, 56% to to 42%. That means that those votes that are already in the bank will strongly favor Obama.

Barack Obama has opened up a huge 23-point lead over John McCain among Asian Americans in California, according to the latest Field Poll of the state. That margin is helping contribute to an overall 22-point lead for Obama among California voters, which if it holds would be the biggest presidential landslide in modern California history, outpacing even the margins racked up by Ronald Reagan. (SF Chronicle story here, PDF with full poll results here.)

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Tonight, we saw yet again that the opinions of the pundits and analysts on the news channels are no more insightful than anyone else’s. They, like us, are simply guessing - an educated guess, to be sure, but no better informed or more likely to be accurate than the guess of any politically engaged person. The difference between this election season and those in the past is that thanks to innovation and technology, the pundits have been forced to open up the conversation. In past years, the pundits could ponder and prognosticate for hours, days, and weeks without the inconvenience of confronting contrary evidence or perspectives, allowing a handful of folks to set the conventional wisdom. The winner of a debate was who the pundits picked as the winner, and the rest of us accepted it because we heard little disagreement when we turned on the TV or picked up the paper.

But thanks to snap polls and a brigade of citizen journalists, analysts, and fact-checkers on the Internet, we now see clearly that the pundits have no clothes. Immediately at the close of today’s debate, CNN’s team of wise men and women proclaimed this Obama’s worst debate and McCain’s best. Within minutes, they were scrambling to reinterpret their initial responses in light of their own poll results and insisting that they knew McCain had lost it all along.

For polling and my own equally inconsequential take on the night, go below the fold.

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Since I was teaching tonight (yes, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is still the greatest book ever), I tuned in to the debate just in time to hear the first word out of John McCain’s mouth be “Ayers.” Yes, it was McCain Gone Wild, in last-chance mode, throwing every attack he could think of at Barack Obama.

But as with the two previous debates, it was McCain, not Obama, who was the story: Angry McCain, seething with barely controlled rage, condescending, grimacing, rolling his eyes, even getting in a good snort at the end. And in the face of it, Obama was cool, cool, cool, never taking the bait or letting McCain get under his skin, playing his own game. It’s exactly what he did brilliantly the past two debates. And it’s why the snap polls (results below the fold) show a third straight strong Obama win.

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The recently released National Asian American Survey–and its finding of strong support for Obama in the Asian American community–continues to get a lot of media attention. The Star-Ledger (NJ) reports today the survey’s finding that Asian Americans in New York and New Jersey back Obama over McCain by a 2-to-1 margin. In New York, 42% of Asian Americans support Obama, compared to 20% for McCain. In New Jersey, it’s Obama 37%, McCain 18%.

The story also mentions one of the most talked-about findings of the survey: that a large number of Asian Americans remain undecided (37% in New York and 45% in New Jersey). I have several theories about why this is, but I’ll just mention two factors, both of which have to do with the poll itself.

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Around the midway point of tonight’s debate, there was a long reaction shot on Barack Obama’s face as John McCain launched into another nasty attack. The TV cameras love to do this–in fixed-podium debates, it’s often through the split-screen–in hopes of catching some embarrassing or awkward response: the “sigh,” the “smirk,” the “chortle.” But Obama’s expression was one of utter calm: he was listening intently, watching McCain with just the trace of a smile on his face, reacting almost not at all. At 9:42 p.m., I changed my Facebook status to: “Timothy sees the Zen of Obama.”

Two minutes later I got a gleeful Facebook message from another Asian American friend of mine. At almost precisely the same moment, she had changed her status to say that she “needs to be zen, like Obama.” (Tom Brokaw must have been listening to us: he characterized the final question of the debate as “sort of Zen.”) That serene, reassuring image has got to be the take-home shot of this debate.

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Initial polling from CBS and CNN:

CNN poll of debate viewers: Obama 54%, McCain 30%

CBS poll of uncommitted voters: Obama 40%, McCain 26% (Updated from CBS)

Details of CNN and CBS polls below the fold.

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