PPP: Obama up 5 in Ohio and 4 in Virginia

The Democratic pollster weighs in with its last Ohio and Virginia polls of the cycle, showing Obama with slim but meaningful leads in both:

PPP's final polls in Ohio and Virginia find Barack Obama ahead in both states, 52/47 in Ohio and 51/47 in Virginia. PPP has conducted four polls in each of these states over the last three weeks and has found an average lead of 3.75 points for Obama in Ohio and an average advantage of 3.5 points for him in Virginia. ... Obama's winning [Ohio] thanks to leads of 54/44 with women, 86/11 with African Americans, and 61/33 with voters under 30. And although he trails Romney with independents (49/47) and white voters (51/47), he's holding Romney to margins well below what he would need to win those groups. It's a similar story in Virginia. Obama's up 56/43 with women and 92/8 with African Americans and he's holding Romney to a 58/40 advantage with whites, which is below what we've generally been finding for him nationally recently. When you combine Obama's relative strength among white voters with Virginia being one of the more racially diverse states in the country it's the formula for a lead.

As you can see in the POLITICO polling center, that lead in Ohio is consistent with most recent public polls from the state, while the result is Virginia is on the optimistic end of polls for Obama in the state. Conventional wisdom says that Ohio is the most important state on the electoral map, and with good reason: it's Obama's strongest mega-swing state and probably Romney's toughest hurdle on the map. But Ohio is only Romney's most important obstacle if he has already won Virginia and Florida, and both PPP and NBC/WSJ/Marist suggested this weekend that neither of those states is bet-your-life-on-it secure for the Republican.