Why Terry Dropped

We've been saying all along that even among voters planning to vote for a particular candidate in the Virginia primary, a good chunk are open to changing their minds between now and election day. That means for each candidate a certain segment of their support is solid and a certain proportion of it is weak. The reason Terry McAuliffe dropped from the poll we released on May 22nd to the one we put out on Tuesday is that he lost a lot of his weak supporters.

Here are the numbers from the May 22nd poll:

Candidate	Support	% of Supporters Solidly Committed	Total Solid Support	Total Weak Support
Deeds	20	62	12.4%	7.6%
McAuliffe	29	58	16.8%	12.2%
Moran	20	53	10.6%	9.4%

And here are the numbers from the June 2nd poll:

Candidate	Support	% of Supporters Solidly Committed	Total Solid Support	Total Weak Support
Deeds	27	56	15.1%	11.9%
McAuliffe	24	66	15.8%	8.2%
Moran	22	45	9.9%	12.1%

As you can see from these numbers, the percentage of voters solidly committed to McAuliffe stayed pretty much level, as you would expect if they are indeed solidly committed. But he dropped four points worth of weak support. People who were open to changing their minds about who to vote for logically would be much more susceptible to having their preferences influenced by attacks against McAuliffe and that appears to have hurt him.

Some folks seem to think this is a two person race between McAuliffe and Creigh Deeds. I don't buy that yet but it is interesting that Brian Moran's support is the weakest among the three candidates- you have to wonder if that means some folks planning to vote for him are more anti-McAuliffe than anything else and waiting to see who has the best chance of beating him at the end. By most measures Deeds fits that bill at this point.

Still, the fact that the pendulum shifted from McAuliffe to Deeds so rapidly is a lesson that it can also swing back toward McAuliffe or Moran equally as fast. I almost always feel confident that a Saturday/Sunday poll the weekend before the election reflects people's final choices but this is one case where there are so few voters with hardened opinions that even something minor in the last 48 hours before folks go to the polls could somehow shift the balance- it wouldn't take much.