LinkKerry 50
Bush 42
Nader 2
Undecided 6
Sample size = 502 +/- 4.4%
Conducted Friday Night
Hard to know if this is a change or not.
ARG and Research 2000 have been running pretty similar this year, and the last ARG in New Jersey also showed Kerry +8.
Mind you there have also been a ton of polls in the 0-5 range as well.
This is certainly not bad news for Kerry, hard to say, yet if it is good news either.
By SHANNON D. HARRINGTON
STAFF WRITER
A poll conducted Friday by The Record showed John Kerry with an eight-point lead over President Bush in New Jersey, despite other polls in recent weeks indicating a virtual deadlock in the race for the state's 15 electoral votes.
Of the 502 likely voters polled in the Garden State, 50 percent said they were planning to vote for the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, and 42 percent said they would vote to reelect Bush, a Republican. Six percent remained undecided, while 2 percent said they would vote for independent Ralph Nader.
The poll was taken the day after the first debate between Bush and Kerry, which was watched by more than 80 percent of those polled by The Record. Nearly half of those who saw the debate said Kerry won, and 34 percent said Bush won.
"There are two bottom lines," said Del Ali, whose firm, Research 2000 of Rockville, Md., conducted the poll on behalf of The Record. "New Jersey is a Kerry state, No. 1. And, No. 2, Kerry did very well in the debate. Bush did not do very well."
The poll results are consistent with initial assessments of Thursday's 90-minute debate in Florida, which political observers on both sides said gave Kerry's image a much-needed boost.
After the Republican National Convention in New York a month ago - where the GOP hammered Kerry on seemingly inconsistent statements about his Iraq war position and questioned his resolve to fight terrorism - Bush gained a significant bounce in many national polls. In terrorism-scarred New Jersey, Kerry's once double-digit leads were reduced to a statistical dead heat, many polls showed.
Kerry sought to turn the tables on the national security issue during the widely watched debate, saying the president erred in invading Iraq and starting a war that diverted attention from the hunt for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Despite the widespread belief that Kerry won the debate, only 3 percent of those who watched it said it affected their choice between the two men.
Still, Ali said, "That insignificant three points can be huge in a very close race."
The poll also showed that New Jerseyans are split on which man can better lead America as commander in chief.
A slight plurality, 42 percent to 39 percent, said they trusted Kerry more than Bush to handle the war in Iraq. But Bush was trusted more than Kerry - 48 percent to 37 percent - to handle the war on terrorism.
Ali said the split bodes well for Kerry, whose main objective has been to draw a distinction between the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq - as opposed to Bush's message that the war in Iraq is a war on terror.
"If [Kerry] separates Iraq from the war on terror, bottom line is he wins the election," Ali said.
A spokesman for the Bush campaign said that despite the indication in The Record poll that Kerry has pulled ahead in New Jersey, the state remains very much in play.
"The Kerry campaign is clearly worried about New Jersey, or they wouldn't have sent [Kerry running mate] John Edwards there," Bush campaign spokesman Kevin Madden said of the North Carolina senator's stop at a rally in Newark last week. "It's a state we're going to keep our eye on and see if we can't win."
A.J. Sabath, co-director of Kerry's New Jersey campaign, said Friday's poll shows there's no reason for the state's Democrats to be alarmed.
"I think what you're seeing is that the political climate changes pretty often," Sabath said. "So the truth of the matter is we keep our cool and work our plan. And polls are interesting tools, but we don't drastically change our plan."
More than 62 million viewers tuned into the debate Thursday, a much larger audience than the one that watched the first presidential debate in 2000 between Bush and former Vice President Al Gore. Still, the audience did not come close to the record-setting 80.6 million viewers who watched the Oct. 28, 1980, debate between Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Carter
