OH-PPP: Obama @ 44% approval, leads Republicans by at least 2%

[King]

Obama Approval -8

Favorable:
Perry -9
Cain -13
Romney -19
Bachmann -19
Palin -25

Obama is still the least hated of the bunch, although Perry is close.  He is also the most unknown at the moment so I expect that to fall as well.

[King]

party id sample: D +10

LOL

There are and there are always will be more registered Democrats than Republicans in polls of most states as the Republican Party is more ideologically purist and does not feature as many moderates as the Democrats.  It is more important with polls to look at how they identify ideologically:

41% Conservative
31% Moderate
27% Liberal

This is a correct sample.  If you stupidly adjusted it on party ID, that would turn it into a majority conservative sample.  A place that elects Sherrod Brown as its Senator is not a majority conservative state.

[King]

There are and there are always will be more registered Democrats than Republicans in polls of most states as the Republican Party is more ideologically purist and does not feature as many moderates as the Democrats.  It is more important with polls to look at how they identify ideologically:

41% Conservative
31% Moderate
27% Liberal

This is a correct sample.  If you stupidly adjusted it on party ID, that would turn it into a majority conservative sample.  A place that elects Sherrod Brown as its Senator is not a majority conservative state.

It seems a little high on the number of liberals and a little low on the number of moderates. If I remember correctly, the Gallup ID poll had Ohio at 19% liberal and only a handful of states at 27% liberal or higher. It's hard to say whether this changes the results a whole lot and at this point Ohio should be in the toss-up/lean Obama category along with a slew of other battleground states, but the difference in ideology is worth keeping in mind.

I don't believe Gallup has ever been known to have good state polling, but maybe data says otherwise.  They're a top rate national pollster I know.

[King]

I think the national breakdown is usually closer to 40-40-20 conservative-moderate-liberal and I don't expect Ohio to be wildly different from this, certainly not enough that moderate and liberal are within four points.

Nationally, CNN exit polls in 2008 had it it at 44% moderate, 34% conservative, 22% liberal and in 2004, 45% moderate, 34% conservative, 21% liberal.

This poll might be slightly too liberal for Ohio, but it's probably also slightly too conservative as well.  It could also be that moderates are apathetic being so far from the election and not responding to polls at the moment as much as liberals and conservatives.

[King]

CNN Ohio had the following:

2008
45% Moderate
35% Conservative
20% Liberal

Less liberals, but also less conservatives. If you were to reweigh Bachmann-Obama from the crosstabs with those numbers, you would get approximately the following:

Obama 49.7%
Bachmann 38.2%

Obama actually does 2 points better than the original this way.  So I guess PPP is a conservative pollster.  Who knew?