SUSA about to release Clinton/McCain & Obama/McCain GE polls for all 50 states

[Sam Spade]

Some of these numbers are pretty funny but then you have to expect that (isn't it about one in twenty polls that blows up totally? And here are one hundred polls! And early polls are often a little silly anyways). But the general pattern makes a certain amount of sense.

^^^^^  Absolutely correct.  (1/20 is right too)

Of course, there's other issues here that are being pointed out, as well as some not being pointed out.  I'll add one in particular that is quite important.  Texas and Ohio numbers should not be trusted if they were in the past two weeks.

What I'm going to try and do later is put the numbers together and weight by state based on turnout the last 4 elections because there's a few things I'm looking for nationally, and 30,000 is quite a good sample.

[Sam Spade]

Do you think Clinton picking Obama would pull in the votes of people on this site (for example)?

Do you think a black man/white woman ticket would pull in the over 55s?

After three months (and possibly more) of this primary continuing, how much infighting between Clinton and Obama supporters is going to cause them to think McCain is a second choice to their first option?

Just a few thoughts to think about, that's all...

[Sam Spade]

Do you think Clinton picking Obama would pull in the votes of people on this site (for example)?

The people on this site aren't a good cross section of Democratic voters because we're all so obsessed with the race and follow it so closely. The vast, vast majority of voters haven't been following anywhere near as closely as us and thus aren't as radicalized (for lack of a better word) towards their candidate.

The other two points I think are quite valid though.

I suspect the under-35 Obama supporters who support McCain are a bit more radicalized than the normal under-35 population, but maybe I'm wrong.  The analogy was probably not the greatest, I admit.

[Sam Spade]

Based on the numbers posted above, I should be able to do one of the three major breakdowns that I'm curious about.  The other two require internals.

National popular vote numbers (averaging last three elections per state and weighting)
National party ID
Candidate % of party ID

I may eventually do a national racial breakdown, if I get to it.

[Sam Spade]

Well, it certainly appears that there are no hard feelings against Obama in FL.

There are a good number of states I trust SUSA in - with caveats of course.  Florida is not one of them - for some reason they have a pisspoor record there - too much to the Dem side.  But for my purposes, that's not what I'm interested in right now.

[Sam Spade]

From the looks of the internals, Democrats should be praying to God that Barack Obama is the nominee—McCain's relative strength against him in most states is due to defecting Democrats.  Obama's strength is largely due to independents.

Hillary, meanwhile, is solid with Democrats, but performs poorly with independents.

Those Democrats should be far easier to consolidate than the indies.

That presumes, of course, that those are the types of Democrats who can actually be consolidated behind a black man named Barack Hussein Obama.  Without physical force in the voting booth, of course.  I remain unconvinced.

[Sam Spade]

Bump...

I weighted these polling results to an average of voter turnout 1996-2004.  This is not perfect, but it gets out some high/low turnout issues.  I substituted in some reasonable figures for DC that I thought would approximate other things I saw in these polls.

National Popular Vote
Obama 46.87%
McCain 44.07%
Undecided 9.07%

Clinton 45.75%
McCain 44.49%
Undecided 9.76%

Party Affliation
Democrat 44.00%
Republican 31.45%
Independent 19.20%
Other 5.35%
Observations
1) The higher undecided figure on the Clinton side is almost entirely due to black people in certain states.
2) I suspect the Obama number is only higher presently because of some of the *interesting* results these polls show in the west.
3) Even though I haven't done the party ID breakdown yet, in 3/4 of the states (minimum), Clinton does better than Obama among Dems (even in states where he performs much better than her), and in nearly every state, Obama does better than Clinton among GOPers and Indys.  Now, since I suspect Democratic affliation is a decent bit higher than we'll see come GE time, that's something to keep in mind.  Also important to keep in mind is whether you think it is easier for Obama to consolidate Dems or McCain to consolidate GOPers and pick off more conservative Indies.
4) If you discard the *tied* states (NJ/VA for Obama; MI/NM/TN for Clinton), you come up with:
Obama 267
McCain 243
Undecided 28

Clinton 271
McCain 234
Undecided 33

Considering Obama performs roughly 1.5% better in terms of the popular vote, this is what I mean when I say that Clinton performs better electorally than Obama does in a close race.
Next on the list for me to do is a breakdown of party ID and race and maybe more.

[Sam Spade]

I certainly agree - and I had noticed it before too, which is one of the reasons why I did the above work.

[Sam Spade]

I must admit that one of the reasons I prefer Obama to Clinton is that I think the country as a whole is better off with a less polarized electorate. If more Republicans and Independents will support Obama, I feel it's worth it to lose some Democrats. Of course, the accuracy of these polls can (and should) be debated, especially with the small sample sizes of demographic groups.

Of course.  And it is also merely a "snapshot in time".  But that's one of the reasons why I did the national vote numbers...

Because after hard weighting, the MOE of a sample this size is liable to be pretty low, all told.

[Sam Spade]

After three months (and possibly more) of this primary continuing, how much infighting between Clinton and Obama supporters is going to cause them to think McCain is a second choice to their first option?

I think the only safe assumption about that is that the share will be smaller come election time than the polls now show.
That mostly means the difference between Clinton and Obama will likely be smaller than the polls now show, too.

One might infer from my first sentence that McCain is bound to do worse on balance than polls now show, but (while possible) I'm not making that claim; Reps are hardly united behind their candidate yet either, and quite a few of them, too, are currently supporting an unusual second choice (Obama or Clinton) after not getting their first choice (one of the non-McCain Republicans). Many of them are going to come back as well. And there's the whole "Dems currently more fired up because the campaign's still going; this shows up in polls" line of argument that I'm not sure I'm buying but cannot dismiss either.

I have no disagreements with your statement - I'm just pointing out the differences.