John McCain 45
Barack Obama 41
Bob Barr 5
John McCain continues to hold the 2-5 point lead that pretty much all public polling in North Carolina has shown over the last month. This is one state where the polls are not seeing wild fluctuations.
Obama continues to have difficulty nailing down the votes of self identified Democrats here- right now he leads 67-20 among them. It's not a new phenomenon for a meaningful number of voters in North Carolina to vote Democratic on much of their ballot but not for President, but Obama will need to push that number up closer to 80% to have much of a chance of taking the state.
John McCain is having a lot less trouble in this department, pulling the support of 83% of Republicans.
While this may not necessarily be the year North Carolina goes blue for the first time since 1976, there is some information in the poll that could bode well for Democratic prospects in the future. Barack Obama leads 46-40 among those surveyed who were born in a place other than North Carolina. John McCain has the 49-36 advantage with natives of the state. As more and more people come to North Carolina from other places, it could trend more Democratic in national elections.
Full results here
Some reasons I think NC will remain competitive, despite polling:
ReplyDelete1. Eight populous counties control 40% of NC's votes. Obama won all of these in the primary by *wide* margins - and the Democratic primary turnout in these counties dwarfed the Republican turnout, in some cases by a factor of 3- or 4-to-1.
2. In the 2004 election, 14 counties collectively provided 50.54% of NC's votes, while the remaining 86 counties together accounted for the remaining 49.46%. In the top-voting 14 counties, Bush's margin of victory was 2.77%. In the remaining 86 counties, his margin was 9.87%, for a combined statewide win of roughly 12.64%.
Now, in 2008, it is *not at all unreasonable* to think that Obama could win those "top 14 voting counties" by 10 point margins, because those counties - given both current polling and the demographics of those counties. What seems far less likely is that McCain can carry the "remaining 86" by the 10 pts he would need to offset a strong Obama showing in the "top 14" - especially given that Obama has some strength in the Eastern parts of the state which went to Bush in '04. Even in McCain managed Bush's 10%, we're talking about a toss-up, not a 4% lead as current polling suggests. The regional breakdowns in polling have not yet been specific enough for my liking - voting in NC is very much a county-by-county business, and Obama has visited (in some cases multiple times), sent surrogates to, delivered major speeches in, and otherwise intelligently targeted the key locals that he will need to win.
3. NC has "One Stop" Early Voting with on-site registration. The Obama campaign worked this masterfully in the primary, and so has the technique down for the general. Based on their ground game with Early Voting, they came into the NC primary with enough of an early vote advantage that even if he had polled even with Clinton on election day proper, Obama still would have won by 5%. Expect to see this again in November. Obama will come into election day with a huge early vote advantage, and only a massive election day turnout for McCain (which won't materialize) would allow for an upset/close finish.