A large number of general election polls for various states have come out recently and I wanted to analyze them in some way, whereby the standing of the leading Democrats can be compared to that of the Republicans.  

Methodology:

I thought that doing this via map format may be the easiest and most understandable way.
In order not to overwhelm with a large number of maps, I decided to narrow down their number by averaging the Republican results from the individual polls.  For example, looking at results for Virginia (where SurveyUSA poll is used) the data included:

Clinton 45 - Giuliani 45
Clinton 48 - Romney 41
Clinton 50 - Huckabee 40
Clinton 42 - McCain 51

The Clinton "number" is derived by averaging the four Clinton numbers above (46.25), while the Republican "number" is the average of the four Republican candidates (44.25).
We can then derive the number by which Clinton leads the "average" Republican (2.0), and then compare this to John Kerry's 2004 percentage in Virginia (Clinton doing 10.2 points better than Kerry).  The same process is repeated for Obama.

"Averaging" the Republicans also makes sense, as the Republican field is now in such disarray that it's hard to tell who their nominee will be.  It should be noted that, depending on the pollster, different Republicans were matched.  For example, SUSA last used the four Republicans mentioned above, while Rasmussen has recently tended to match against Giuliani, Romney, McCain, and Thompson.

There's more...

This is a "digest" of 2008 polls that I have come across since Obama entered the landscape.

The general trend is that, Obama has essentially risen to the number two spot for the nomination in national polls, but in strategic vision state polls (covering some key states), Gore is in a strong second place, somewhat ahead of Obama. Edwards is hovering around 10% in most polls, and hence remains a factor.

There's more...