ANN ARBOR—As the race for the White House enters its final, crucial days, results of the second Big Ten Battleground Poll detailing the attitudes of voters in the eight-state Big Ten region will be released Oct. 23.

The survey, which results from a partnership between eight Big Ten universities, will be unveiled in a 90-minute show called “Big Ten Battleground: Campaign 2008.” The program will air at 4 p.m. Thursday on the Big Ten Network.

The poll will indicate voter preferences for the candidates in each of the eight states in which the universities are located, including some of the most hotly contested states in the nation. The first wave of results will be posted in the early morning on Thursday at http://www.bigtenpoll.org. Results that are more detailed will be posted at the site later in the morning.

The scientific poll, which is sampling 600 individuals in each of the eight states and 800 respondents from the rest of the United States, is co-directed by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientists Charles Franklin, co-developer of Pollster.com, and Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which tracks political ads on television. The survey will cover Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota and compare the results to the rest of the nation.

“In national polls, Barack Obama has benefited from the downturn in the economy since the September poll was conducted,” said Michael Traugott, professor in the University of Michigan Department of Communication Studies and a research scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). “We are going to see how it has impacted the race in each of these states.”

Results of the first Big Ten Battleground Poll were released on Sept. 18 and can be found at http://www.bigtenpoll.org, along with more information about the poll, the university partnership and the Big Ten Network program.

Faculty members from around the Big Ten say the project will provide valuable insight on how the electorate views the race and serve as an important classroom and research tool, providing a bridge between academia and real-time politics.

Universities participating in the partnership are the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn State University and UW-Madison.

“Big Ten Battleground: Campaign 2008” taps the power of the Big Ten Network to provide its universities with topical university programming outside of the sports realm. Each Big Ten campus can take advantage of up to 60 hours of university programming on the network each year.