Barack bounds — another poll shows Obama with a 15-point lead

June 25, 2008

Over the weekend, Newsweek released the results of a national poll that showed Barack Obama leading John McCain by an eye-opening 15 points. Given that most recent national polls showed Obama’s lead more in the low-to-mid single-digit range, it was easy to assume the Newsweek numbers were just an outlier.

But when two major, reliable national polls show the same unexpected result, it might be time to take the numbers seriously. This time, it’s a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll:

In a two-man race between the major-party candidates, registered voters chose Obama over McCain by 49% to 37% in the national poll, conducted Thursday through Monday.

On a four-man ballot that included independent candidate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Bob Barr, voters chose Obama over McCain by 48% to 33%.

Nader (4%) and Barr (3%) are drawing primarily from McCain, though their impact may be limited if they aren’t on the ballot. Barr’s Libertarian Party is on the ballot in 30 states and is hoping to get to 50. Nader has qualified for the ballot in four states, but intends to get to 40.

The “enthusiasm gap” we talked about yesterday is evident, as is the division among conservatives. Nearly eight in 10 liberals intend to support Obama; only 58% of conservatives said the same of McCain. For that matter, more than half of McCain’s voters said they were “not enthusiastic” about their chosen candidate, while 81% of Obama voters said they were enthusiastic in their support.

If there’s good news for McCain in the poll, it’s hard to find. Obama enjoys a big lead among women, and is tied among white voters. For all the talk about intra-party divisions among Dems, the great majority of Hillary Clinton’s backers have moved to Obama, while 11% prefer the conservative Republican.

Wait, it gets worse for McCain.

TNR’s John Judis highlighted this tidbit:

In gauging a candidate’s appeal, I always look at the “cares more about people like you” question. It is what George W. Bush did well on even when people disagreed with his policies, and what the past two Democrat nominees did relatively poorly on. What about Barack Obama against John McCain? You’d think that Obama would be hampered on this question by racial differences, as he appeared to be during the Democratic primaries, but when the poll asked, “Regardless of your choice for president, who do you think cares more about people like you?” Obama bested McCain by 50 to 23 percent — among males by 42 to 27 percent and females by 56 to 20 percent. That says a lot to me about John McCain’s difficulties as a presidential candidate and does say something about Obama’s prospects in the fall, in spite of the fact it is only June.

And what of the differences between the polls? Why do Newsweek and the LAT/Bloomberg polls show big leads for Obama, while Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls show modest leads? I’m happy to let the professionals tackle the explanation of statistical models and sampling, but Mark Kleiman notes that the tracking polls “assume fixed partisan proportions within the electorate, and reweight the results of their daily polls to make the sample match the assumed “true” proportions of Democratic and Republican identifiers. Neither LAT/Bloomberg nor Newsweek does that, and both show voters tilting strongly Democratic. That may explain the difference between Obama +6 (Rasmussen), Obama +3 (Gallup) and these much bigger margins.”

There’s also the common conservative refrain that Dukakis enjoyed a large-but-fleeting lead over H.W. Bush in 1988, so Obama’s lead is easily ignored now. Time will tell, of course, but the analogy seems flawed. For one thing, Obama’s a better candidate than Dukakis. For another, Dukakis’ biggest leads came after the Democratic convention, while Obama’s current standing is not artificially inflated. And finally, H.W. Bush was running to succeed a relatively popular incumbent Republican president — McCain is running to replace Bush, whose approval rating has dropped to a jaw-dropping 23%.

Susan Pinkus, director of the Times Poll, concluded, “It appears to be a Democratic year. This election is the Democrats’ to lose.”

Are voters going to grow complacent, or will they go make it happen? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

the great majority of Hillary Clinton’s backers have moved to Obama, while 11% prefer the conservative Republican.

11% is not far from the exit poll numbers in the primaries since Texas and Ohio or Hillary voters who said they intended to vote for McCain even if Hillary got the nomination. Most of these were probably part of the Limbaugh school of thought.

  • *begins shopping for a collection of “put John McCain in a blender and hit the puree button” soundtracks….*

  • CB, I think you’re missing a number in there. As in what percent of McCain voters said they were “not enthusiastic.”

  • Guess I did something wrong. I tried to blockquote the text with the missing number, only it didn’t show up at all. It’s this one:

    “For that matter, more than of McCain’s voters said they were “not enthusiastic” about their chosen candidate…”

  • Susan Pinkus, director of the Times Poll, concluded, “It appears to be a Democratic year. This election is the Democrats’ to lose.”

  • Oops. Left out one carrot and lost most of my comment. Sorry.

    Susan Pinkus, director of the Times Poll, concluded, “It appears to be a Democratic year. This election is the Democrats’ to lose.”

    This is what scares me. The Democratic Party “leadership” has demonstrated an astonishing ability to lose elections, or in instances like Iraq war funding or the recent FISA “compromise” to surrender the field to the Republicans without a shot being fired.

    These polls give me two reasons reasons for optimism, though. First, that despite the best efforts of McCain’s “base” to protect him, the American people appear to be looking beyond the “news” that gets past the filter of the corporate-controlled media. And the more voters learn about this latest version of John McCain, the less they like him.

    Secondly, as I’ve said before, the bias of the corporate-controlled media isn’t really toward either liberal or conservative politics, it’s toward “conventional wisdom”. And once “conventional wisdom” has decided that Barack Obama is going to win big, the presstitutes will jump on the bandwagon.

  • These polls give you a nice warm and fuzzy, but I’m not making the mistake I made in 2004, by getting my hopes up high based on polls.

    Also unlike Dukakis, Obama is African-American. Other than the recent primaries, there’s no precedent to compare how the “I-don’t-want-a-black-president” turnout will be in a general election. I think of it as a large unknown…

  • I’ve said it before. I get the impression that John McCain wants to be President, but he really doesn’t want to BE the President. He wants to be nominated and elected and inaugurated and called “Mr. President,” but my impression of him is that he has no interest or desire to actually be the day to day working President. If there is little enthusiasm for him it may be in large part because he exhibits so little enthusiasm himself. His policies are muddled, dull and backward. He seems irritable and distant. Its clear that most people in this country feel we need the wind to blow in a new direction. He’s stagnant, and it shows.

  • Somewhere this morning I read that Dukakis lost his 17% lead because he took some time off from campaigning to do some governing, and thereby gave Bush pere time in which to set the definitions – that’s sure not gonna happen this time.

  • He wants to be nominated and elected and inaugurated and called “Mr. President,” but my impression of him is that he has no interest or desire to actually be the day to day working President.

    That’s my take, too. Yes, he seems irritable and distant, as well as tired and unfocused.

    This is happening eight years too late for his taste, and it shows every day in his voice, expressions and body language, not to mention in the amazingly lifeless bullshit that comes out of his mouth. It’s a sad day when a Republican can’t get up the energy to say utterly outrageous things with a little enthusiasm and fake conviction.

  • “I get the impression that John McCain wants to be President, but he really doesn’t want to BE the President.”

    I think that pretty much sums up EVERY Republican who was running this year, particularly the comatose Fred Thompson, who didn’t really even seem to want to RUN for president, let alone actually BE president. Because Republicans don’t really have anything they want the government to do (besides enrich their friends and smite their enemies), there really isn’t much purpose for them to be president besides the ego trip.

    And of course, that also sums up our current president who demonstrated his dislike of presidenting by basically handing over the important stuff to Cheney. But at least Bush actually enjoyed campaigning, unlike McCain who would clearly rather hang with his peeps in the media than talk to the riff-raff on the campaign trail (especially when the riff-raff asks him actual questions about anything). But beyond that, being President finally gave Bush the respect he always felt he deserved but could never have gotten otherwise. Privileged slackers are like that; they want all the glory, but none of the work.

  • A quick question I was hoping one of you political wonks, who are a lot better informed about these things than I am, might have the answer to. Before the Iowa caucuses, there was a lot of speculation about whether there might be a “hidden” youth vote that would come out for Obama without having been predicted by pollsters. Part of the idea, it seemed, was that young people are more likely to use cell phones than land lines, meaning that pollsters wouldn’t contact them and thus would overlook their influence. So what I’m wondering is: is there any speculation that a similar “hidden vote” effect might be coming into play in these general-election polls? I haven’t read or heard anything about it, yet I couldn’t see any reason why that might not be happening now just as it happened last winter.

  • At this point, I’m fairly confident that Obama has learned from the mistakes of 2000 and 2004. The main problem then, I think, was that democrats were still in the “we have to rise above the GOP’s sewage” phase. They were still telling themselves that to even acknowledge the smears gave them legitimacy, and that Americans were smarter than to fall for it.

    Obama is being much more proactive, and he is fiercely defending himself and firing back whenever someone tries to smear him. That’s the right approach to take. If you don’t address the smears, then they will fester, people *will* fall for them, and then you’ll lose the election. I think Obama knows that, and so he’s not going to let the GOP trash him with impunity.

    That’s not the only thing he has to do, of course, but it is one of the big ones. And judging by how he’s been conducting his campaign for the past year or so, he already has it under control.

  • But how does there being two polls showing Obama with a 15 point lead…HURT Obama?

    Mary? The Ignorati needs its hero!

  • Also, the tracking polls don’t take into consideration the people who have been registered but didn’t vote and the newly-registered voters, or the committment of younger voters. Tracking polls are not designed to deal with votes like 1932 or 2008.

  • Agree with almost every comment here — which surprises even me — and the cell-phone/land-line distinction is brilliant. (My fellow history buffs will remember that the only poll that showed Landon beating Roosevelt in 36 was conducted by phone — a relative luxury at the time.)

    I just have to add to Shade Tail’s comment that the other mistake Democrats made was ‘triangulation,’ which never worked. (Carter almost lost to Ford despite Watergate, and Clinton would have been killed if he’d run in a head-to-head match with GHWB — he only won the first term because Perot was in the race.) This time we aren’t going to run a Lieberman or a McCain as a VicePresidential candidate.

    The Democrats have been so scared — practically since McCarthy — of the noise the ‘silent majority’ (which was neither) made that they haven’t noticed that they have been on the popular side of most issues, not just the right side. America has, in fact, been liberal since Roosevelt, and the only successful Republican Presidents have been Eisenhower — who was, in fact, to the ‘left’ of most Democratic candidates since Carter — and Reagan, who spoke the Conservatives’ line, but really didn’t do anything to advance their social agenda and who was helped by Carter’s failure in Iran and his appeal to greed during the decade where people were saying “Greed is good.”

    Obama is no more a ‘conservative Democrat’ than was FDR — who, remember, argued during the campaign that Hoover was wrong for not balancing the budget. They both were magnificently pragmatic which is why they were so successful — and both were criticized strongly from the left as well as the right before they took office.

  • Re the cell phone question: There are two distinct lines of thought here. Political pollsters have been saying that the young people reached at home via a land line are giving the same answers as those who would be reached via a cell phone. Whether that’s true or not will be tested in this election.

    Another school of thought: One of the biggest public health surveys, done for years to 25,000 or so people, STOPPED this year just because the survey group couldn’t reach enough young people, and thus the results weren’t valid.

    Also: In polls that are done over a weekend (when more younger voters aren’t home to answer the phone, if they have a phone), Obama’s numbers seem to fall a bit. In those done during the week, his numbers rise a bit.

    It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out during the whole election season and during the election itself.

  • Molly beat me to it. There are two schools of thought on the cell-vs.-landline issue based on conflicting research: bottom line is that we really don’t know yet.

    Thanks, Molly, for also including the weekend/weekday polling disparity that received so much interesting speculation during the primary season (when Clinton polled better during weekends, Obama during weekdays). I’m among those who will be watching all these issues with great interest.

  • There is indeed a long time until November. But what if the trends continue? What if it looks more and more like Obama will blow out McCain? Is there a chance that McCain will withdraw “for health reasons” before the GOP convention, suddenly opening the field to new contenders (who will benefit, of course, from a supreme press frenzy)? And if so, who comes out on top? One of the candidates who couldn’t even beat McCain, or someone completely new?

  • He won’t be laughing when voters go to the real polls for John McCain in January.

    I encourage everyone to go to the polls for John McCain in January. The rest of us, having voted in November, will be busy inaugurating President Obama.

    John McCain = Dementia matched only by his base.

  • “Regardless of your choice for president, who do you think cares more about people like you?” Obama bested McCain by 50 to 23 percent — among males by 42 to 27 percent and females by 56 to 20 percent.

    Dang! There’s a LOT of elitists out there!

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