Sandy stalled more than the political campaigns today (well, one of them, at least). After a record triple-digit poll count on Monday, today we saw releases from just
39 polls. That would be less than half of what we saw on Monday. As one might expect, nearly none of them were actually in the field on Monday. Only the SurveyUSA Ohio poll, and a couple of the tracking polls, actually culled new responses as Superstorm Sandy ravaged the eastern half of the United States.
Mostly, the narratives that have guided us for most of the past fortnight remain intact. Mitt Romney looks markedly better in national polling than in state-by-state polling. The lack of consistent movement in national polls has truly become remarkable: neither candidate has had a national polling lead of more than a percentage point in two weeks.
The state polls are still an issue for Romney, and if you buy stock in a column by consummate insider analyst Charlie Cook earlier today, the road to 270 could be very fraught with peril for the challenger.
More on that after the jump. For now, though, on to the numbers:
PRESIDENTIAL POLLING:
NATIONAL (ABC/WaPo Tracking): Romney 49, Obama 48
NATIONAL (CBS/New York Times): Obama 48, Romney 47 (LV); Obama 48, Romney 43 (RV)
NATIONAL (Ipsos/Reuters Tracking): Obama 47, Romney 46 (LV); Obama 49, Romney 41 (RV)
NATIONAL (NPR): Romney 48, Obama 47
NATIONAL (PPP for Daily Kos/SEIU): Obama 49, Romney 49
NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Romney 49, Obama 47
NATIONAL (UPI/CVoter): Obama 48, Romney 47
CALIFORNIA (Pepperdine Univ.): Obama 56, Romney 33
COLORADO (Grove Insight for Project New America/USAction): Obama 48, Romney 45
FLORIDA (SurveyUSA): Obama 47, Romney 47
GEORGIA (SurveyUSA): Romney 52, Obama 44
MASSACHUSETTS (Suffolk University): Obama 63, Romney 31
NEVADA (Grove Insight for Project New America/USAction): Obama 49, Romney 43
NEW MEXICO (Public Opinion Strategies for the Wilson campaign): Obama 47, Romney 42, Johnson 6
NORTH CAROLINA (SurveyUSA): Romney 50, Obama 45
NORTH DAKOTA (Mason Dixon): Romney 54, Obama 40
OHIO (Grove Insight for Project New America and USAction): Obama 48, Romney 45
OHIO (SurveyUSA): Obama 48, Romney 45
OREGON (Davis Hibbits Midghall): Obama 49, Romney 42
OREGON (Elway Research for the Oregonian): Obama 47, Romney 41
DOWNBALLOT POLLING:
CA-SEN (Pepperdine Univ.): Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) 51, Elizabeth Emken (R) 32
FL-SEN (SurveyUSA): Sen. Bill Nelson (D) 49, Connie Mack IV (R) 41
MA-SEN (Suffolk University): Elizabeth Warren (D) 53, Sen. Scott Brown (R) 46
MN-SEN (Mason Dixon): Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) 65, Kurt Bills (R) 22
NV-SEN (Grove Insight for Project New America/USAction): Sen. Dean Heller (R) 44, Shelley Berkley (D) 43
NJ-SEN (Philadelphia Inquirer): Sen. Robert Menendez (D) 50, Joe Kyrillos (R) 32
NM-SEN (GBA Strategies for the Heinrich campaign): Martin Heinrich (D) 51, Heather Wilson (R) 41, Others 6
NM-SEN (Public Opinion Strategies for the Wilson campaign): Heather Wilson (R) 44, Martin Heinrich (D) 43, Others 6
ND-SEN (Mason Dixon): Rick Berg (R) 47, Heidi Heitkamp (D) 45
OH-SEN (SurveyUSA): Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) 46, Josh Mandel (R) 41, Scott Rupert (I) 3
NC-GOV (SurveyUSA): Pat McCrory (R) 53, Walter Dalton (D) 36, Barbara Howe (L) 5
CA-36 (Lake Research Partners for the Ruiz campaign): Raul Ruiz (D) 48, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R) 42
NV-04 (SurveyUSA): Danny Tarkanian (R) 47, Steven Horsford (D) 42
NM-01 (Albuquerque Journal): Michelle Lujan-Grisham (D) 51, Janice Arnold-Jones (R) 36
NM-02 (Albuquerque Journal): Rep. Steven Pearce (R) 56, Evelyn Madrid Ehrhard (D) 38
NM-03 (Albuquerque Journal): Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D) 53, Jefferson Byrd (R) 35
NY-19 (Siena): Rep. Chris Gibson (R) 48, Julian Schreibman (D) 43
ND-AL (Mason Dixon): Kevin Cramer (R) 50, Pam Gulleson (D) 40
RI-01 (Fleming and Associates): Rep. David Cicilline (D) 42, Brendan Doherty (R) 41, David Vogel (I) 6
A few thoughts, as always, await you just past the jump ...
Charlie Cook, he of the National Journal and the political report that bears his name, analyzed the prospect of an electoral vote/popular vote split. In so doing, he offered a glimpse behind the curtain which should be quite heartening to those hoping and praying for a second Obama term (emphasis mine):
Right now, Obama is clearly ahead in 21 states (including the District of Columbia), with a total of 253 electoral votes, 17 short of the 270 needed to win. In addition to the 17 states (including D.C.) that have never been competitive, which total 201 electoral votes, I’ve added four states that have been in play, in varying degrees, where Obama now has a clear lead in credible, private surveys from long-standing professional polling firms calling landlines and cellphones (notwithstanding whatever the robo and Internet polling shows). The states are Michigan (16), Nevada (6), Pennsylvania (20) and Wisconsin (10).
I have no doubt that Cook is privy to internal polling that neither you nor I will ever see. And two of these states, honestly, are barely a surprise: most folks concede that Michigan and Pennsylvania are longshots for the GOP (despite the late maneuvering that seems to be as much about building a narrative as it does actually changing the electoral map).
But the inclusion of Nevada, and especially Wisconsin, is pretty damned shocking, since to classify those states as having "clear" Obama leads would defy much of the conventional wisdom of those two states (and much of the publicly available polling, at least in Wisconsin).
If we take Cook at his word (and there is no reason not to), that gets Obama to 253 electoral votes. Cook also cites state totalling 191 electoral votes as being in the Romney column. Again, no surprises there: it is the McCain '08 coalition, plus the NE-02 single electoral vote and Indiana.
Thus, if we go with Cook's calculus here, we are down to seven states that are still defined as battlegrounds. Let's look at the most recent polling averages in those states, from the best to worst for Obama:
Poll Averages, released since 10/22, Electoral Votes and Number of Polls in Parentheses)
NEW HAMPSHIRE (4 Electoral Votes--8 polls): Obama +2.6
OHIO (18 Electoral Votes--22 polls): Obama +2.0
IOWA (6 Electoral Votes--4 polls): Obama +1.8
VIRGINIA (13 Electoral Votes--13 polls): Obama +1.3
COLORADO (9 Electoral Votes--8 polls): Obama +1.1
FLORIDA (29 Electoral Votes--13 polls): Romney +0.6
NORTH CAROLINA (15 Electoral Votes--7 polls): Romney +2.4
If these averages were to hold, the final electoral vote count would be Obama 303, Romney 235. Furthermore, it appears as if Romney would need a two-point shift in the final week to finally make it to the threshold necessary for election, as that would conceivably get him those four states needed to pull past the 270 electoral vote barrier.
Of course, if Obama gets the two-point bump, Florida could well fall to the president again, which would render Virginia, Iowa, and Colorado (and Ohio, for that matter) essentially irrelevant.
The great variable in all this, of course, is Sandy. How the storm impacts the election, and the public views of the president and the challenger, is still very much unknown. We may not know until the weekend before the election what, if any, impact this late-breaking tragedy will have.
In other polling news...
- Rarely will you see a more unsparing takedown of a pollster than the one that Boston Phoenix writer David Bernstein lays down on one Andy Smith. If the name is unfamiliar to some of you, he is the director of the polling unit at the University of New Hampshire. UNH's polling has been (rightfully) dinged in the past for its almost absurdly inconsistent trajectories (in 2006, they found a lead for then-challenger Paul Hodes erode by eight points...in two days). But Bernstein looks at the unit's poll in Massachusetts, and suspects that Smith may "have it in" for Elizabeth Warren. Damning stuff.
- Today's SurveyUSA poll in North Carolina is one of the better Romney results of recent vintage there (from a reputable pollster, at least). It is nevertheless intriguing, because a look at the sample shows it to be a potential floor for Barack Obama, with ample room to grow. The sample of the poll was only 21 percent African-American, and had a partisan ID split that favored the Democrats by only 6 percentage points. This is quite a departure from the early voting statistics to date, which had an eighteen point Democratic advantage and had African-Americans comprising nearly 29 percent of the electorate to-date. That is actually a higher proportion of the early vote for black voters than was the case in 2008. And with 1.7 million North Carolinians having already voted early, this is far from a small sample size.