The official Xbox color may be green, but when it comes to politics, online gaming venue Xbox Live is clearly a blue state.

According to a Microsoft rep, a final pre-election poll taken over the weekend shows Democrat Barack Obama with a commanding lead over Republican John McCain among XBL gamers. Here are those numbers:

• Obama 53%
• McCain 33%
• Undecided 14%

In a late September XBL poll, Obama led 43-31%. The new data seems to suggest that some XBL users who were undecided or who supported other candidates in the earlier poll have largely shifted to Obama.

As Xbox Live project manager Ben Vaught recently pointed out to GamePolitics, with 14 million subscribers, if Xbox Live was a state, it would be the seventh largest in the U.S. with 20 electoral votes.

Last month GamePolitics tracked Xbox Live's inaugural use of political polling among its members. In that survey, XBL users overwhelmingly gave the nod to Barack Obama as their choice for president - and that was before anyone knew about those now famous in-game Obama ads.

In partnership with nonprofit Rock the Vote, XBL has just completed a new round of polling. This time users were asked to name which issues were most on their mind.

So what's the answer? In the words of Deomocratic campaign strategist James Carville, it's the economy, stupid. Here are the numbers:

• 35%        Jobs and the Economy
• 19%        Environment
• 18%        Foreign Policy
• 14%        Health Care
• 14%        Education
   

At this point it's fair to say that XBL has jumped into the election season with both feet. In addition to user polling and a voter registration drive, the online service is offering election 2008 gamerpics and themes, as well as a music video from The Presidents of the United States of America's new album.

On Monday, GamePolitics spoke to project manager Ben Vaught about the injection of politics into the XBL user experience. Vaught hadn't seen the results of the new poll at that point:

The reason we do these polls is that Xbox Live is more and more becoming a bellwether of where youth voting trends are going… This [new] poll is really a chance for Xbox Live members to tell the presidential candidates... this is why were voting, this is why this election matters to us…

 

I thought [the Obama ads were] amazing. This is a community of over 14 million members. They’re active and engaged, they’re vocal. And it's not just about games and entertainment. They're also active and engaged and feel very stongly about the direction of their country… If Xbox Live was a state, it would be the seventh largest with 20 electoral votes.

[Rock the Vote] is very happy with how everthing is turning out. For Rock the Vote, they’re going to where younger voters are this election and this year they’re on Xbox Live. With Microdoft and Xbox, we know that the presidential election is important and we’re really trying to do our part to encourage turnout and for people to vote.

A press release touting Xbox Live's partnership with Rock the Vote notes that Barack Obama has a 12% edge over John McCain among participants in an XBL poll. 100,000 users took part, which, according to the press release, makes the XBL sample larger than Gallup, NBC and CNN combined. Of course, as Giant Bomb notes:

...they aren't pretending that it's actual science, because there are so many holes in this poll that it's impossible to take it as anything other than sort-of interesting. For example, as someone who has more than one Xbox Live gold account, I probably could have voted twice...

Still, it is a fascinating use of what started out a few years back as a space designed strictly for online gaming.

As far as the results, Obama's big lead is not especially surprising, given that XBL users likely skew significantly younger than the population as a whole. Here are the numbers:

• Obama \ Biden:                  43%
• McCain \ Palin:                    31%
• Undecided:                         13%
• Other:                                13%

Of more value than the polling is the impressive level of political engagement engendered by the XBL / Rock the Vote partnership. As the press release points out:
 

In its first two weeks of the program, more than 55,000 voter registration forms were downloaded through Xbox LIVE and xbox.com. Additionally, videos from the recent Democratic and Republican conventions were downloaded nearly 25,000 times.

 

To-date, the Xbox LIVE community has downloaded more than 350,000 pieces of program-specific content, ranging from candidate gamerpics to videos and Rock the Vote logos. That’s nearly five times the amount of people present at Barack Obama’s acceptance speech during the Democratic Convention in Denver.