Strickland Trails By 3 In Internals
September 16, 2010 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Share This
By Steven Shepard
Two public polls released over the past 24 hours paint a bleak picture of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland's (D) re-election prospects, but recent surveys conducted for the Strickland camp show Strickland and former Rep. John Kasich (R) locked in a more competitive race.
According to the most recent Strickland campaign tracking poll, conducted over the past 2 weeks and obtained by Hotline On Call, Strickland trails by Kasich by 3 points, 48% to 45%.
A CNN/Time/Opinion Research Corp. poll, conducted Sept. 10-14 and released Wednesday, showed Kasich ahead by 7 points, while a Quinnipiac Univ. poll, conducted Sept. 9-14 and released Thursday, showed Kasich ahead by a whopping 17 points. Kasich's lead in both public polls was outside the margin of error.
In addition to their internal polling, the Strickland camp is also touting the release of 2 new TV ads today that focus on their candidate's job-creation efforts
The Strickland campaign tracking poll was a rolling sample of two surveys from the Feldman Group, one conducted Sept. 7-10, and the other Sept. 12-14. A total of 1,200 voters were polled, for a margin of error of +/- 2.8%.
http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2010/09/strickland_trai.php#morep.s.
Daily Kos had a comment on the Q-poll out today showing Strickland down by 17 (which is way off, imo):
OH-Gov: Q poll disastrous for Dems, but is there a slight caveat?
Only rarely do I look at the demographic details of a poll to try to explain away a particularly ugly (or particularly good) data point, but this poll out today from Quinnipiac merits such treatment. The toplines have got a lot of attention today: the poll shows Republican John Kasich leading Democratic Governor Ted Strickland by a 54-37 margin. What caught my attention was the partisan breakdown. Strickland did marginally worse with Democrats than Kasich did with Republicans, but the differences were not massive. Kasich enjoyed a 23-point edge with Indies. So, how in the world did they get a seventeen-point lead overall? Clearly, there was an issue with either GOP oversampling, Democratic undersampling, or...well...both.
Applying the 2006 exit poll demographics for Ohio, the margin was halved to eight points. Even using the best GOP parameters over the last several election cycles (2004: R 40 D 35 I 25, which was a better breakdown by party than was even seen in 1994), the margin is cut to less than fourteen percentage points. Not that it is anything to write home about, but clearly, Quinnipiac is seeing the most stratified electorate by party in recent history.