Will Daggett hold his support?

There still seems to be an assumption that Chris Daggett's polling numbers right now are a lot better than his share of the vote on election day in New Jersey will be.

I'm not too sure though. For one thing he still seems to be gaining in the polls. And even though a lot of his supporters are weakly committed Jon Corzine and Chris Christie are so unpopular that they may truly end up deciding to cast a protest vote rather than grudgingly picking one of them.

Polls released this week, three weeks before the election, have shown Daggett at an average of 14%. I decided to look at all the independent or third party candidates who have received at least 5% of the vote in a Gubernatorial contest since 2006 and see where they were polling roughly three weeks prior to election day and how that compared to their final share of the vote. (I couldn't find any information on where Andrew Halcro, who got 10% of the vote in Alaska, was polling at this stage. Also I have noted the number of polls I could find from a comparable time period to calculate these averages.)

State	Candidate	Mid-Oct. Poll Avg.	Final Vote Share
Illinois (3 polls)	Rich Whitney	10	10
Maine (1 poll)	Barbara Merrill	12	22
Maine (1 poll)	Pat Lamarche	9	10
Mass. (2 polls)	Christy Mihos	8	7
Minnesota (1 poll)	Peter Hutchinson	7	6
Texas (3 polls)	Carole Keeton Strayhorn	18	18
Texas (3 polls)	Kinky Friedman	16	12
Vermont (2 polls)	Anthony Pollina	20	22
Louisiana (2 polls)	John Georges	10	14

With the exception of Kinky Friedman none of the candidates did more than a point worse than they were doing in the polls three weeks before the election. On average they even did a little more than a point better.

It certainly is common for a third party candidate polling well over the summer to end up being a nonfactor. But if you're still in the game at this point you're usually going to end up staying in it. I bet Daggett will truly end up getting double digits at the polls on election day.