It's been the story of all three of her reelection runs: Barbara Boxer always looks vulnerable early in the cycle and then pulls away and wins easily in the end. It looks like that will be the case again this year, as she now leads Carly Fiorina by a 52-43 margin.
It's not that California voters particularly like Boxer- in fact by a 46/44 margin more of them disapprove of her performance than think she's doing a good job. But Fiorina simply has not proven to be a formidable candidate. 49% of voters have an unfavorable opinion of her to 38% with a favorable one. It's not impossible to win as a Republican in California, but it is impossible to win as an unpopular Republican.
Fiorina would have had to do three things to win this race: win independents by a large margin, get close to 100% of the Republican vote, and get a significant amount of crossover support from Democrats somewhere in the 20% range. On the independents front she's doing well, holding a 54-37 advantage. But she doesn't have nearly the amount of bipartisan support she would need to win, getting only 10% of Democrats. That's actually less than the 13% of Republicans supporting Boxer, which means she's not holding onto her own party's support to the extent she needs to either.
Perhaps if the Republicans had nominated someone different they'd be in a stronger position to win this race but barring a major movement in the final week it looks like Boxer will be back for another term.
Full results here
This is a great poll for Fiorina. Your poll shows that 26% of this year's voters have already voted and they favor Boxer by only 48%-46%. That's a significant amount of voters, so the 2 point difference is very meaningful.
ReplyDeleteYou have a 47% Democratic electorate and a 13 point differential. Dems were 40%, 41%, and 42% in 2004, 2006, and 2008. The differential was 7%, 6%, and 12%. Once again your electorate is way more Democratic than even California can produce.
Extrapolating your voting numbers to the already voted they appear to be something like 40% Democratic 33% Republican 27% independent, the 2004 electorate. If Fiorina gets either the 2004 or 2006 electorate and wins independents by 17 points, it's a toss up.
Dems can start to breath a little easier about CA. It seems that the Northeast and Pacific West will be the Democrats best regions in this election. Connecticut, Maryland (Gov), Delaware, New York, maybe Pennsylvania (still tight as another poll shows the race neck and neck today),Massachusetts governor is stabilizing for Patrick, and then Oregon, Washington and California on the Pacific Coast. The ? is how bad will the rest of the country be for the Dems? Can they pull out CO, WVA and NV?
ReplyDelete"It's been the story of all three of her reelection runs: Barbara Boxer always looks vulnerable early in the cycle and then pulls away and wins easily in the end."
ReplyDeleteIsn't this meaningless since you've always had Boxer up by 8-9 points? In order to pull away I would think that she would have to actually improve her margin of victory by more than the margin of error.