Thursday, November 15, 2007

New Elon poll: the generic presidential ballot

Elon released a new poll today showing presidential preferences in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. I don't know how meaningful these multi-state polls are since the individual samples for each state end up being pretty small and we of course do not elect the President by a popular vote but there are still some interesting trends.

In the generic presidential ballot more respondents said they were inclined to vote for a Democrat next year than a Republican by a margin of 36.2-34.6. At first glance this would seem like pretty bad news for Republicans since they won every one of these states in 2004.

But Elon did a similar poll of southern states in February and at that time the generic presidential ballot gave Democrats a 42-31.4 margin. With the luster of the new Congress wearing off and many Americans seemingly as disgusted as ever with Democrats in charge, that spread has tightened in the last eight plus months.

That said, if Democrats really do end up with a popular vote majority in this set of states it seems a safe bet there will be a Democrat in the White House in 2009!
 
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