PA-PPP: Carson, Clinton in the lead.

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Wow, that's quite sickening. How they go with Huck and Carson for Rick.
I'd like to think Walker could play well here if Christie can't catch on, but it's obviously not an early primary so ultimately useless.

At least Romney and Bush are vulnerable, but at what cost?

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Crosstabs obviously have huge MoE, but some very interesting ones, most notably age:



Bush killing it with olds but can't get any youngs to call his name. Paul v. Bush would be an interesting two way race.

Women very indecisive still relative to men, but the candidates with more female support are the SoCons.


The ideology one is always an interesting one. Usually very conservative winds up being synonymous with very Christian, but interestingly enough, that doesn't hold up here: Huckabee leading with very liberal capturing 26% of that tiny demographic.  Santorum's voters are all across the spectrum too, and he actually gets the largest portion of moderates.

Carson doing well across all ideologies but way out in front with the somewhat liberal group at 40%! That's a shocker as I thought he was gaining ground solely due to the base.

In the Cruz vs. Paul fight, the major difference is that Cruz voters identify as conservatives while Paul voters seem to identify as much more liberal. The latter is not shocking considering how his father's supporters identified themselves. Typically you expect them to go after the same type of people despite their pretty different ideologies and priorities.

Most significant would be Jeb Bush voters identifying as very conservative even relative to Romney voters. That showdown gets all the more interesting when Bush fails to position himself to Romney's right. These voters likely have a negative opinion of Romney for being too centrist so being to Romney's left would not be good.

Finally, Scott Walker, the man expected to do well across all segments is only gaining support from the very conservative portion. Will he find it difficult to position himself with the Midwest union voters who don't identify as that far right?


Lots of interesting stuff to overanalyze in there!

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Joke poll.

Carson is not leading in any state at this point, other than maybe in MD.

Is it really that hard to believe though? Considering that basically nobody cracks 20% outside of their home state, it's not too much of a stretch to think he could lead in a few random states despite having support in the teens.

Except for Romney.  He's at ~20% or more in the national polls, and we've had polls in the last six months by other pollsters that showed Romney leading in CO, IA, KS, MA, MI, NH, NC, and even AR.  The only place where he's trailing is in NJ, where Christie is of course leading.  This is the first poll outside NJ that includes Romney in which he's trailing, and it seems rather unlikely that he'd put up such a poor showing in PA of all places.

Sometimes I think Pennsylvania's status as a Northeastern state is really overstated for Republicans. There is little reason to expect Romney or Christie to do well when the entire eastern part of the state is full of heavily Democratic voters. There are some Republicans in the western Philly suburbs, but the Democratic strength extends all the way up to Scranton pretty convincingly. Republicans are much more Midwestern types either in both the central and western parts of the state.

The one thing that sort of contradicts that would be the stereotype of pro-choice Republicans, but my hypothesis would be undue influence from the eastern Republicans for in-state candidate recruiting. These candidates are all outsiders.

Of course, if Romney is at 22% nationally, you'd probably expect 17% or so here, but that's not extremely off from what he received. It's so late in the primary season, PA won't matter unless the field is as splintered as I am hoping for.