Today's Polls, 5/7

As the dramatics of the primary season begin to recede, we'll be slowing down our pace a bit and getting back to the core mission of this site, which is analyzing general election polling.

The only poll out today is from Rasmussen, which has John McCain leading both Democrats by 4 points in Wisconsin. In Rasmussen's previous poll of Wisconsin, McCain lead Barack Obama by 2 points and Clinton by 11. Other polling in Wisconsin has been more favorable to Obama, and we still rate him as a favorite to take the state.

One commonality between Wisconsin and New Hampshire, where Obama has also polled badly recently, is the large number of independent voters in each state, a group with whom Obama has also lost some traction in national polling. Independent voters tend to be heavy consumers of news, and so it will be interesting to see whether Obama can make up ground if he gets more favorable coverage coming out of Indiana and North Carolina.

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The Vindictive Clinton Voter, and Other Myths

There's this meme out there, one that I'm sure that I've helped to perpetuate at one time or another, that a lot of Clinton supporters have become so fervent in their support of their candidate, or so burnt out by the primary process, that they will not vote for Barack Obama in November. The same perception exists to a lesser extent for Obama supporters.

It's true that there there are a relatively large number of 'defectors' this year -- self-identified Democrats who may vote for John McCain in November. This is especially true for Barack Obama. However, this does not appear to be the result of the primary process itself. On the contrary, party loyalty within the Democratic Party has gradually been increasing as the primary season has worn on.

Each month since November, SurveyUSA has been put out McCain-Obama and McCain-Clinton surveys in fifteen states where it has media clients: Alabama, California, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. This happens to be a relatively good mix of regions, and red, blue and purple states.

For each set of monthly polls, I compiled the average amount of support that Clinton and Obama won from Democrats, Republicans and Independents, as identified in SurveyUSA's cross-tabulations. I threw any undecided votes out, so what I was left with the two-way vote share between the Democrat and McCain. This is a lot of data to work with: approximately 8,000 interviews each month. The tabulation of those results is below.





What do we see here? Obama has a rather high defection rate -- an average of 24% of Democrats in the SurveyUSA states presently say they'll vote for John McCain. By comparison, 11% of John Kerry's Democrats defected to George W. Bush in 2004. However, while Obama's defection rate is high, it's actually lower than it was a couple of months ago. Whereas Obama got the support of 72 percent of Democrats in each of November, December and January, those numbers have improved to 77-75-76 in the last three months. Clinton has been receiving more votes from Democrats as well -- 82 percent in April, versus 79 percent in March.

And where have Democrats been losing support? From Republicans. Obama is down to 15 percent of the Republican vote after peaking at 19 percent in December; Clinton is at 12 percent after being at 15 percent in November and December. The behavior of the independents, meanwhile, has fluctuated from month to month and accounts for most of the noise in the data, but without any clear long-term trend (other than Obama consistently outperforming Clinton amongst this group).

If we like, we can extrapolate these trends all the way out to November:



If these trends hold up, Obama would finish with the support of 82 percent of Democrats, 12 percent of Republicans, and 48 percent of independents. Assuming a party ID breakdown of 40/30/30, with the 40 being the Democrats, that would get him 50.8 percent of the two-way vote. Clinton would get the support of 88 percent of Democrats, 6 percent of Republicans, and 42 percent of independents. The Democrat and Republican numbers are almost exactly identical to John Kerry's figures, although Clinton would perform materially worse amongst independents (overall, her numbers project to 49.6 percent of the two-way vote, thanks to the partisan ID shift toward the Democrats).

Nevertheless, Obama's defection rate is high -- and to a lesser extent so is Clinton's. If we reject the hypothesis that this is because of the primary process itself, we need some alternative explanations:

1. John McCain is a strong opponent. I think John McCain gets too little credit. There was a point in time a year ago when he was not only the presumptive Republican nominee, but the presumptive #44, and when many Democrats I knew were openly fearful about running against him. While McCain has hit some bumps in the road since then, he remains far stronger than the other nominees the Republicans might have selected. Let's compare, for instance, the defection rates in January against a man who truly embodies the term 'generic Republican': Mitt Romney.



In January, about 28 percent of self-identified Democrats were ready to defect to McCain in an Obama-McCain matchup, but just 19 percent to Mitt Romney in an Obama-Romney matchup. And 20 percent planned to defect to McCain in a Clinton-McCain matchup, but just 12 percent to Romney in a Clinton-Romney matchup. Not only is McCain objectively a fairly strong candidate, but he also has a higher-than-usual amount of bipartisan appeal -- particularly since, given the focus on their own campaign, the Democrats haven't really been able to brand him as a conservative.

2. The Democrats have a bigger tent than they used to. Remember my general rule about candidate support: when a candidate is gaining support, his support tends to be softer, and when a candidate is losing support, his support tends to be harder. This also applies to political parties. The Democrats have gotten a bounty of new registrations -- but not all those people will have fully drunk the kool-aid. You might have someone who is ready to vote for a Democrat -- but isn't ready to vote for a Clinton. You might have someone who is ready to vote for a Democrat -- but isn't ready to vote for a liberal senator from Chicago.

3. Defection rates may inherently be higher before the nominee is chosen. A Quinnipiac poll from January 2004 showed George W. Bush getting 14% of the two-way Democratic vote against John Kerry, 17% against John Edwards, 18% against Wesley Clark, and 20% against Howard Dean. Once Kerry became the nominee in March, his defection rate dropped somewhat to 12%; we'll never know, obviously, what would have happened for the other Democrats. But defection rates do seem to be somewhat higher before the nominee is known.

This might seem to contradict what I said before about the primary campaign not being responsible for the high defection rate -- so let me be more precise about what I'm arguing. I'm not arguing against the notion of the unity bounce. But I am arguing that the length of the campaign isn't responsible for the high defection rate -- if it were, the defection rate would have been increasing. In fact, the campaign might prove to be helpful in states like Indiana and North Carolina, which have been completely ignored by Democrats in recent years, but which are plausible swing states on a good Election Day.

The problem is not with when the campaign might end, but how the campaign might end -- there are substantial risks if a large number of Democrats do not perceive the nominee as legimiate. And that could be a problem: according to a NBC/WSJ poll conducted last month, a 41-32 plurality of Democrats would not perceive the nominee as legitimate if the superdelegates overrode a pledged delegate majority. At the same time, some Democrats might not perceive Barack Obama as legitimate if the party was perceived as pushing Hillary Clinton aside before she was ready to go.

4. Race (and gender) may be factors. There are undoubtedly some Democrats who won't vote for a black man, and some Democrats who won't vote for a woman, and those may impact these numbers at the margins.

-*-*-

By the way -- it may also be the case that the fraction of Clinton supporters who won't vote for Obama is increasing. This is because Clinton's support has gradually but steadily been decreasing. If there is 15 percent of the Democratic base that won't vote for Barack Obama against absolutely anyone, they will constitute a larger share of Hillary Clinton's support when she's polling at 41 percent versus when she was polling at 52 percent. But the number of defectors is not increasing as a share of the Democratic electorate -- in fact, just the opposite is true. Clinton supporters are behaving not behaving punitively to Obama, nor are Obama supporters behaving punitively to Clinton.

Instead, the media has been thrown off the trail by the order in which the primaries happen to take place. If Tom Brady throws for 400 yards one week in perfect weather against the Dolphins' secondary, and 200 yards the next week in sub-zero conditions against the Packers' secondary, it is not like Brady became a worse quarterback: that is about what we would expect from Brady given the contexts he was competing in. And likewise for the Democrats. For Clinton, Virginia is like facing the Packers, and Pennsylvania is like facing the Dolphins. For Obama, just the opposite is true. Our demographic analysis of Pennsylvania, based on everything we knew about the way the Democrats had split the vote up so far, suggested that Hillary Clinton would win by a margin of 7.4 points; she actually won by 9.1 points. That estimate, which looked at no polling data at all, was more accurate than 8 of the final 10 polls of the state. It looks like the Democrats are exchanging blows, trading whole subgroups of voters between them with every contest, but all they are really doing is fulfilling their manifest destiny.

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Wright and the Obamacans

One of the many nice things about Survey USA is the extensive set of interactive cross-tabulations that they release with every poll. Survey USA has now released polls in fifteen states that were taken at the height of the Jeremiah Wright controversy (this past Friday through Sunday). We can compare the demographic groups in these polls to Survey USA's previous set of polls, which were conducted in the last couple days of February.

I will be keeping track of five sets of demographic characteristics that Survey USA included among both sets of polls: gender, age, race, party ID, and orientation on the political spectrum (conservative/moderate/liberal). Another demographic that would be nice to look at -- income levels -- was tracked by Survey USA in their February polls but not in their March polls, so we have no choice but to ignore it.

One other methodological annoyance: Survey USA used different age brackets between the different surveys. Although the 18-34 age group was common to both polls, Survey USA handled the other groups of voters differently. I will be lumping the brackets together as follows:

Age       February    March
"Young"   18-34       18-34
"Mid-Age" 35-54       35-49
"   "                50-64
"Old"     55+         65+

Otherwise, this is a rather straightforward exercise: I'm merely comparing Obama's net advantage against McCain between the February and the March surveys. If Obama was leading among whites in Oregon by 6 points in February, but he trailed by 2 points in March, that would be recorded as a "-8".

Here come the numbers:



(That chart might be a little hard to read, so I've temporarily created a larger version of it along the right-hand sidebar. Yes, we're the only website in the world that devotes more space to its sidebar than its main column).

Let's pick through these demographic groups one by one:

Gender: Obama's margin declined by a slightly larger margin among women (7 points) than men (4 points), but the differences are small enough that they're probably not worth worrying about. The gender gap was most noticeable in the Midwestern states. Between Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, Obama declined by 12 points among women but 4 points among men. Elsewhere in the country, the gender differences were roughly equal.

Age: There do seem to be some age-related effects, with the Wright story tending to have done more damage to Obama among older voters, but because of the ambiguities of Survey USA's age brackets, it would be dubious to come to too many conclusions. Taking the 55-64 year olds and shifting them from "Old" to "Mid-Age", as we had to do here, would likely have a deleterious effect on Obama's numbers irrespective of the Wright controversy.

Race: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Obama lost ground in every state except Oregon amongst whites. He gained ground amongst blacks in all states except the three Southern states: Alabama, Kentucky, and Virginia, where he actually backtracked a little bit. The polling data on Hispanic voters is mixed ... the only two states with a whole lot of Hispanic voters were California and New Mexico, and Obama gained a bunch of ground amongst them in California (+24), while losing a bit in New Mexico (-5). Notice, by the way, how the media seems to have completely forgotten about Hispanic voters now that we have a good ol' fashioned white-black racial controversy to kick around.

Party ID: Obama lost the most ground -- an average of 9 points -- amongst Republicans. This is actually fairly hard to do, because there weren't that many Republicans voting for him to begin with. But for the time being, the Obamacans appear to be in hibernation. The interesting piece of news for Obama is that he lost hardly any ground at all amongst independents, although the results bounced around rather radically from state to state. (Survey USA tends to have fewer self-identified independents in their surveys than other pollsters, and so the sample sizes are a little smaller).

Political Orientation: But here's the weird thing. While Obama lost the most ground amongst Republicans on the party spectrum, he lost the most ground among liberals on the political spectrum: 11 points among libs, as compared to 5 points among moderates and just 2 among conservatives (among whom he had little of the vote to begin with).

What to make of these seemingly contradictory results?

Actually, I don't have a great answer for you. Let's try and get a discussion going. But it certainly looks to be thatliberal and moderate Republicans -- not independents, but specifically voters who identify as Republican -- who were willing to indulge the idea of an Obama vote before, have at least temporarily reverted to their base.

Now, if you accept that this is what has gone on, there are a couple of takes you might have on this. Shall we spin the wheel?



Spin #1. These voters were inherently soft, vulnerable supporters of Obama anyway. It is asking a lot for Republicans to cross over and vote for a Democrat -- only 6 percent of them voted for Kerry in 2004. The way Obama -- or Clinton for that matter -- was always going to win this election was by turning out the base, winning over independents, and taking advantage of the blue-leaning shifts in party identification throughout the country. You do two out of those three things (and one of them is really a gimme), and you'll probably win the election. You do all three, and you win big.

On the other hand, if these voters were soft supporters of Obama, that likely now means that their support for John McCain is also fairly soft. There are really relatively few swing voters in the general election -- 80% of the country is voting reflexively by party ID -- which is why polling numbers in general elections are much more stubborn than polling numbers in primaries. But, sort of Linc Chafee / Olympia Snowe Republicans, and perhaps also libertarian-leaning Republicans, are a group of voters that must feel authentically conflicted about what to do. It doesn't take a lot to shift them from one group to the other -- nor might it take a lot to shift them back.

These may also have been voters who were intrigued by Obama's unity message, a brand which was at least temporarily damaged by Jeremiah Wright.

Spin #2. On the other hand, perhaps this also has to do with media consumption habits. The Wright story was handled very differently from media outlet to media outlet, from a full-frontal assult on Obama on FOX News, to a relatively benign treatment at the New York Times. (This effect is even more noticeable in the wake of Obama's speech on Tuesday, which has acted as a depth charge of sorts for partisan conservative pundits). Do Obamacans still watch FOX News and listen to Rush Limbaugh? My hunch is that they do -- that it forms their sort of home base for media coverage, even if they often disagree with its conclusions. When the conservative media went from playing relatively nice with Obama to bashing him non-stop, there was going to be an effect; the Wright incident may have catalyzed it.

Actually, now that that's written, these are really part and parcel of the same explanation. Swing Republicans were vulnerable to being swung -- and the Wright story, amplified by the conservative media, managed to swing some of them. Will Obama's speech swing them back? I don't know. As I mentioned above, it is inherently an uphill battle to ask a voter to cross party lines for you. On the other hand, I would guess that these folks are fairly sophisticated political animals -- you have to have a fairly well-thought out political philosophy to maintain an identification as a Republican these days, but ponder voting for a Democrat for President. And that means they might have been among the 2.3 million Americans and counting who have seen the director's cut of Obama's speech, rather than the sound byte version. It is likely to take at least a couple of weeks before we know for sure.

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A Technical Note

Some of you may want to bypass this post, but in the interests of full disclosure:

I've made a couple of improvements to the regression model that underlies the analysis. The first adjustment is to weight the regression based on the depth of polling data that we have in a given state. Without this weighting, the regression would treat a state like Wyoming, where we have just one poll, as having as much influence over the model as a state like Pennsylvania, where we are already approaching a dozen. Among other things, this should allow the model to "read-and-react" more quickly to new polling data.

The second improvement is to consider a couple of new variables in the analysis: the percentage of the 2004 electorate that identified themselves as Democrat, Independent, and Republican in 2004, according to CNN exit poll data. Obama does comparatively worse in states where a larger share of John Kerry's vote came from self-reported Democrats, and better where more of his vote came from Republicans and Independents. This is consistent with a finding from the recent Pew Poll, which shows Obama losing more self-identified Democrats to McCain than Clinton does, but getting a larger fraction of the vote from Republicans and Independents. This tends to give the model more confidence in Obama's polling lead in a state like New Hampshire, which has a huge number (44% of the electorate) of self-reported Independents, while harming him in a state like West Virginia, where just 18% of the electorate identify as Independent (but 50% identify as Democrat).

The overall effect of these adjustments is to slightly hurt Obama's win percentage, as he loses a few percentage points in industrial states like Pennsylvania that have relatively few independents (20% Independent, 41% Democrat in 2004). Clinton's numbers have moved up a tiny bit.

To get even more technical, the way the regression model is programmed is to consider eight potential variables:

1. The Kerry-Bush margin in 2004.
2. The percentage of Baptists (all Southern Baptists, plus 1/2 of non-Southern Baptists)
3. Obama fundraising (dollars raised per 2004 general election voter)
   
4. Clinton fundraising (" ")
5. McCain fundraising (" ")
6. The percentage of African-Americans in the population
7. The percentage of self-identified Democrats
8. The percentage of self-identified independents

The model discards any variables that are not statistically significant at the 85% confidence level and retains the rest. The variables presently included in the regression model are as follows:

                   Obama               Clinton
Variable      Coeff.   t-score      Coeff.   t-score
Kerry          .549     6.20         .714     13.65
Baptist       -.261    -2.74         .381      4.00
$_Obama       6.708     3.60            DROPPED
$_Clinton         DROPPED           4.627      3.82
$_McCain     -9.421    -2.92       -6.236     -2.34
Af-American       DROPPED           -.173     -1.56
Dem%          -.560    -3.09            DROPPED
Ind%              DROPPED               DROPPED
Constant     24.561     3.78       -3.282     -2.77

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