MADISON, Wis. – Barack Obama and John McCain are statistically tied in their race for the presidency in seven of the eight states home to Big Ten universities, according to a poll released Thursday.

The race is within the Big Ten Battleground Poll’s margin of error in Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Obama has a 16-point lead in his home state of Illinois, a Democratic stronghold he represents in the U.S. Senate.

The poll, the inaugural from a partnership of eight Big Ten universities, asked 600 randomly selected registered voters in each of the eight states for their views on the candidates.

Pollsters say they show the region’s states are again the most competitive in the country and will help determine who becomes the next president.

“We all expected this to be tight – it’s extraordinarily tight,” said poll co-director Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist. “What it’s really going to come down to is the next president is going to be the one to win the Big Ten.”

His co-director and UW-Madison colleague Charles Franklin said the states have moved back to highly competitive races after both parties held their national conventions “with neither candidate having a clear lead, except in Illinois.”

The eight states account for 117 electoral votes and both campaigns are spending big money to advertise on television and organize their supporters in them. On Thursday, McCain campaigned in Iowa and Wisconsin while Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, visited Ohio.

Obama had slim leads in four of the seven competitive states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota. The candidates were tied in Iowa and Pennsylvania. McCain was ahead only in Indiana, a Republican-leaning state that Obama is trying to win. All seven of those states were within the poll’s margin of error of four percentage points.

Poll results show voters in the region overwhelmingly believe the country is on the wrong track and that the economy has gotten worse in the last year. That pessimism should work in Obama’s favor after eight years of President Bush, whose favorability rating was in the 30s in most states, pollsters said.

But voters view McCain much more warmly than Bush. Both he and Obama had favorability ratings above 50 percent in the eight states in the poll, which will be conducted again in late October.