This Poll

Via-Jer's Notes

A couple of quick notes on today's CBS/WSJ Poll which shows Obama leading 49% to 46%.

The first item of note that is very important is the party preference  breakdown which shows, despite the manipulation of the pollsters, that Obama is in real trouble. As is usual he is not doing well with Independents. It is important to remember that Obama took the Independent vote by 8% in 2008, 52% to 44%. In this poll he trails Romney with Independents  by 6% , 50% to 44%.

 If Obama can not win the Independents in this election it would require a Democratic turn out far greater than he had in 2008 for him to win. Does anyone expect the Democrats to turn out in greater proportions than they did in 2008? Me either. Only once in the last 30 years has a presidential candidate won without winning the Independent vote Bush in 2004 received 48% to Kerry's 50%. But in that case the Republican turn out and loyalty to their candidate barely made the difference. Everyone talks about how important the Independent vote is but seem to want to ignore how far behind Obama is with it and the implications.

The other item of interest is the party breakdown which is confusing in itself but it ends up with a D+6 (29/35/36). Although a D+6 just isn't going to happen on November 6, unlike some polls, they at least have some justification for using it since 2008 was a D+7 turnout.

But the interesting factor here is that even though Romney is leading among that over sampled 36% of Independents in this poll somehow Obama still wins the overall, how does that happen even with a D+6 advantage if he is -6 with Independents? Well according to this poll more Republicans are going to vote for Obama than Democrats vote for Romney. According to this poll 93% of Democrats will vote for Obama and 7% will vote for Romney. When was the last time 93% of Democrats voted for their candidate? Well maybe for Johnson  but no Democratic candidate has gotten  90% or above of the Democratic vote since at least before Reagan. Obama in 2008 received 89% of the Democratic vote whereas McCain received 93% of the Republican vote which is typical of a Republican candidate.

Despite the fact that Obama with everything going for him in 2008 could not get 90% of the Democratic vote, according to this poll he will receive 93% while Romney will only receive 90% of the Republican vote, totally reversing a generation of precedent on how the parties support their candidate. According to this poll  7% of Republicans will vote for Obama and only 5% of Democrats will vote for Romney. Do you know or have you heard of a lot of McCain voters who are now going to vote for Obama? Me either. Do you know or have you heard of a lot of Obama voters who are now going to vote for Romney? Me too.

They are pulling out all of the stops to make Obama look like he has this thing won, they are manipulating the polling data and the sampling to get the results that they want. But guess what, the only data that counts is November 6, so vote.