North Carolina much more Democratic?

When weighting statewide general election polls PPP has usually been giving folks who identify themselves as Democrats about a nine point advantage over folks who identify themselves as Republicans.

According to the Pew Research Center though, we might be under weighting Democrats. Their research shows 39% of North Carolinians now describing themselves as Democrats compared to just 26% as Republicans.

In 2004 Democrats had just a four point advantage in their research, 39-35.

It may shock everyone who thinks that we are horribly biased toward the Democratic Party to know that most of our surveys come out with worse results for Democrats after we weight them than they have on the raw counts. That's because there's usually more than a 10% gap between Democrats and Republicans who answer the polls, and we've been randomly deleting Democratic responses to get down to that 9% difference.

Given this independent verification that a 13% divide is more in line with how North Carolinians are identifying themselves now though, I guess we don't need to do as much of that anymore.