Encouraging. This appears to counter the widespread speculation that Virginia would be weaker for McCain than Florida. Add some McCain supporters who are “undecided” or refused to be polled, stir in a PUMA or three, and the Old Dominion looks pretty good.
If the Undecideds go to McCain, he will have 53%. He’s gonna win, don’t give up hope!
I trust M/D polling for the mid atlantic states. Being down 4 points this close to election day has me very concerned now. However, it is good to see that there are still a relatively high number of undecided.
“The Mason-Dixon poll shows that 11 percent of whites are undecided - far more than usual in the closing week of a statewide election, Coker said. The last time the figure was nearly as high was 1989 in Virginia, when Democrat Doug Wilder was elected the nation’s first black governor.”
My guess is that of this “11%”, a large number of them are in fact registered democrats who would have voted the straight party-line ticket for Hillary, but who can’t come to the point where they’re willing to pull the lever (or make the mark) for Obama. Some will pull it, but many more won’t.
If these voters were going to break in his direction, they would have done so by now. I’ll make another prediction that - to assauge their consciences that they remain [basically] true to their democratic roots - they’ll go into the voting booth and vote a straight-party line on the down-ticket, but either vote McCain/Palin -or- not vote the top spot at all. We could see McCain win while most other VA Republican candidates get stomped.
“The survey of 625 likely voters found 47 percent supported Obama, 44 percent preferred McCain and a crucial 9 percent were undecided. Because the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, the race is technically a dead heat”
Several days’ back on FR, there was posted an article on how polls often play out for black candidates. The thrust of the article was that, for blacks, “what you see is what you end up with”, poll-wise. That is to say, that the final number probably reflects the best tally they’ll end up with in the election (note that I said “best”, the final number could be lower, but generally does not go higher).
I’ll speculate that Obama _will_ do a bit better, but that McCain will edge by him to win in a narrow victory. I _would not_ be making this prediction if Obama had already broken the 50% barrier.
I think McCain still has a fighting chance in Virginia.
Rasing my glass (just chocolate milk) in the hope that he takes it!
- John
McCain will win VA by aat least 5%.
Just got back from the Palin rally in Richmond. Had a great time!
my family went to the springfield rally in VA earlier today. What was quite inspiring were the number of minority groups in the crowd supporting the ticket. Not your usual sprinkling either...support and excitement was huge and almost no lefties outside protesting. The strangest group we noticed were the lyndon Larouche people.