Ok, so what is the bad news in all this?

Here's Nate Silver's take on Battleground:

In this case, however, the poll seems to be making a relatively fundamental mistake: it is not weighting by age.

Take a look for yourself at the "weighted tables" that Battleground released a couple of days ago (PDF). These crosstabs provide a ton of detail -- kudos to Battleground for doing so -- but unfortunately there is one red flag. This is the age makeup of their weighted sample:

18-34    17%
35-44    12%
45-64    40%
65+      31%

Intuitively, this probably looks fairly wrong to you -- almost twice as many age 65+ voters as age18-34 voters? And in fact, it almost certainly is wrong. By comparison, here is the approximate age composition of the electorate in 2004, as according to the US Census Bureau**:

18-34    26%
35-44    17%
45-64    38%
65+      19%

Battleground's numbers are not even close. About 19 percent of voters were aged 65 and older in 2004, as compared to the 31 percent in the Battleground sample. On the other hand, 43 percent of voters were aged 18-44, as opposed to Battleground's 29 percent. These differences are much, much too large to be attributable to chance alone. (And all of this is assuming that turnout in 2008 will match that in 2004, even though youth turnout increased markedly in the primaries and is at least somewhat probable to do so in the general election.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/w hats-wrong-with-battleground-poll.html

I don't think this margin will hold for the next 5 weeks, but the longer the better. I believe there's already early voting in some states, namely Ohio, plus absentee ballots will start being filled out and returned. Any votes cast during this period, with a 5-6 point Obama lead, likely work in our favor.

It's similar to California during the primaries. I couldn't believe the Intrade price plummeted to 50/50 based on late nonsense polling, when Hillary had early voting working heavily in her favor, during a period she led the California polling by considerable margin.

In 1992, Clinton beat Bush Sr. by 5%.  That was good for 370 electoral votes.  He did this failing to take Florida, Virginia, or North Carolina.  If Obama wins those three states, plus the other tossups, he could come close to Clinton's total.  Winning nationally by 6% wouldn't hurt either.

there's cause to believe that many of these polls are underestimating Obama by 2 or more points, due to the likely surge in youth and AA turnout.  Given how few of these pollsters call cell phones (I literally only know a single person under 30 that has a land line), 18-30s are almost certainly not being weighted nearly as heavily as they should be.  Although 538's projection of 82% likelihood for Obama seems a tad optimistic, the race is really beginning to break for Obama.  The closer to November we get, the more significant a small lead becomes.  McCain needs something major right now, like an Iranian attack on Israel, to stand much of a chance.

I just wish this economic stuff pushing Obama into the lead wasn't such shitty news for America.  On the other hand, anything that helps McCain (nat'l security emergencies) would probably be much worse.  I'm crossing my fingers for a horrible thursday debate;  Obama above 10% would probably push McCain into the extreme longshot category.