New Presidential Poll

PollingReport has information about a new Newsweek presidential poll. They did a presidential matchup poll just like we did for NC, but nationwide. There's also individual results for the Democratic and Republican races.

On the Democratic side, it seems as though Hillary Clinton is dominating the field, leading Obama 43% to 27%. John Edwards trails with only 14%. It's interesting that this poll doesn't include Al Gore, which is probably a realistic scenario. That might explain why Hillary has so much support. However, my problem with the poll is that only 422 Democrats were surveyed and the MoE is +/-7%. That's a pretty huge margin of error for a national poll done by a large magazine. Although its probably accurate, it still makes Hillary's huge lead suspect.

One extremely strange fact that's easy to miss is that Michael Bloomberg was included in the Democratic field for whatever reason. Why he's in there and Al Gore isn't makes no sense to me. What's even more surprising though, is that he only received 1% support. Bloomberg was also included in the Republican field and only got 2% support. The low numbers make some sense because only registered Democrats and Republicans were included in the each party poll.

The Republican poll includes Fred Thompson, and he has a good showing, coming in second with 19%. Rudy Giuliani still leads with 27%. McCain seems to continue his downward slide, with 15%, while Mitt Romney is the only other candidate in double digits with 12%. This poll surveyed even fewer people (only 324 Republicans) and the MoE is +/-8%, theoretically negating the lead that Giuliani has over Thompson and putting them in a statistical tie. This essentially makes the poll useless because the MoE is so high.

There are a lot of results in the matchups part of the poll that I'll let you read for yourself. But, they did include Bloomberg as a third party candidate in some matchups, and he consistently got over 10%, which makes the fact that he only got 1% in the Democratic field even stranger. It looks like he steals votes from both party, but slightly more from Republicans. Whether or not that factors in to the election next year, we shall see.

One last tidbit: The Democrats win every single matchup listed, with the top three Democrats going against the top four Republicans. However, while McCain and Giuliani's numbers have been steady in the mid to lower 40s for a few months, Romney has gained about 10 points since the tracking poll began in December.