Here are the “internals” for party affiliation:
Democrat - 38%
Independent - 28%
Republican - 28%
If Republicans turn out in numbers similar to the 2004 and 2006 elections (same or about 2% less than Democrats), this election is very, very close!
Based on what I’ve been seeing, I fully expect Republicans to turn out in massive numbers.
Tuesday should be interesting!
-Bob
If the party turnout is within the range it’s been since 1980, this poll says we win.
Where did you find this information for party ID? Thanks.
I can’t make any sense out of this poll. For starters, the actual result was 49-42. Pew gets to 52-46 by splitting up the 9% undecideds almost evenly (in a way with which I disagree, but that’s beside the point.)
So, I’ll do with this poll what I typically do with the TIPP poll. For starters, here are the new results with the D37, R37, I26 distribution of 2004:
Obama 48.0
McCain 45.3
Und 6.7
Hmm....not so good. What about marital status? Are they using the lonely singles trick to get more single people into their sample? When I redo the Pew numbers using the 2004 distribution for marital status while holding everything else constant (i.e. using Pew’s original party ID), the new result is this:
Obama 47.9
McCain 42.9
Und 9.2
Well, Obama’s number stays the same, while McCain goes up by about a point. Okay, there are some lonely singles out there who got to spill out their life story to a pollster. But this isn’t yet getting me excited.
Okay, let’s see if they did the city slicker trick. When I reweighted the numbers by area type (urban, rural, or suburban), but without reweighting the poll by party ID, the breakdown looks like this:
McCain 45.2
Obama 44.8
Und 10.0
Ah hah! Pew tried to get away with the city tricker trick! Pew oversampled urban voters who favored Obama (54-35 in the Pew poll, as opposed to 54-45 Kerry in 2004) and/or undersampled surburban voters (47-43 McCain in Pew, 52-47 Bush in 2004) and the rednecks in the sticks (54-37 McCain in Pew, 57-42 Bush in 2004).
Note the further implications. We can infer from the 2004 numbers that the remaining city slickers lean mostly to McCain, the remaining suburbanites will essentially split or lean slightly to McCain, and the remaining rednecks in the woods will essentially split their votes or lean slightly to Obama. That is, of the remaining undecideds, 75% of them live in areas where they will break slightly for McCain and the remaining 25% live in areas where they will break slightly for Obama. Once again, I see 50-48 or maybe 51-48 in our near future.
One other quick comment. According to this poll, McCain leads 47-45 among white Catholics. This is significant because the voting populations of NH and WI are almost entirely white and more Catholic than the national average. PA and OH also have more than the usual share of white Catholics.