Public Policy Polling

Shuler supporters press for US Senate run Waynesville Mountaineer

The right kind of visibility?

Ryan Beckwith notes this morning that Richard Burr has been stepping up his visibility in recent days. That's something he certainly needs to do with multiple polling companies showing that a plurality of North Carolina voters don't have an opinion of him. But is railing against politically popular programs like SCHIP and the stimulus the kind of visibility that's going to help build up his numbers?

A poll we conducted in October 2007 showed 60% of North Carolinians in support of SCHIP. There was quite a division along party lines, with 87% of Democrats in support and 66% of Republicans opposed. 62% of independents were supportive.

There's not been any publicly released North Carolina specific polling on the stimulus that I'm aware of but as Mark Blumenthal pointed out this week, no matter how you word it more Americans support it than are opposed. I don't see any reason why the numbers would be different here.

I guess by opposing these programs Burr is appealing to the base, but no matter how much Republicans may try to ascribe their losses last year to disaffected conservatives staying home because the party 'lost its roots,' the reality is that there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans in the state right now. No Republican is going to win statewide without securing a good number of votes from Democrats and independents, and as long as Burr just keeps on toeing the party line on everything he's not going to give them much of a reason to cross over and support him.

Four purple states that could turn blue

According to the exit polls, voters under 30 were more supportive of Barack Obama than those over 65 in every single state. There was a wide disparity among the states though in terms of the size of the generation gap between young voters and senior citizens, ranging from just five points in Georgia to a high of 66 points in Ohio.

Four of the six states where that disparity hit 49 points or more were among the most hotly contested battlegrounds of the 2008 election. They all went blue this year and given the huge difference in voting patterns along generational lines in each of them, they could go from purple to blue in another few decades as the more conservative voters age out. Here’s a look at Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, and Nevada.

Ohio:

Barack Obama took the Buckeye state by a little under five points. He lost by 11 points with voters over 65 but won by a staggering 55 with those under 30.

It’s not surprising that senior citizens gave McCain a double digit victory in the state. Since 1976 the Republican candidate for President has done better in Ohio than he did in the popular vote nationally in every election except 2004, when John Kerry’s margin of defeat in the state was three tenths of a point less than it was on a national basis.

As that reliably Republican demographic ages out and these younger, considerably more Democratic voters become a larger segment of the state’s electorate it could become a more solidly blue state. One caveat though: Ohio has one of the slower growth rates in the country and if these young voters move out of the state in disproportionate numbers it could slow the state’s political transformation.

North Carolina:

The Tar Heel state provided Barack Obama’s narrowest victory in the country, and young voters had a lot to do with it. He racked up a 48 point victory with that demographic while losing senior citizens by 13 points for an overall generational disparity of 61 points.

North Carolina, like Ohio, has tended to vote a good deal more Republican than the nation as a whole. Since 1964 its Presidential vote has come down that way every time except 1976 and 1980 when the state gave a higher level of support to Jimmy Carter from the neighboring state of Georgia than he received nationally.

In migration is helping to fuel the blueward trend in the state. A PPP study conducted last August found there was a 13 point difference in the Presidential margin between voters who were born in North Carolina and those who were not, with the newcomers going strongly for the Democrat. There’s no reason to believe the population expansion in the state is going to stop any time soon, and at this point it’s moving the state in a more progressive direction.

The voters who put Jesse Helms into office time and time again are being replaced in the electorate by these much more progressive younger voters. They put Obama over the top this year, and they could have the state wearing a darker shade of blue by the 20s or 30s.

Indiana:

An 80 year old person in Indiana may have cast their first vote for President in 1952. That generation of voters in the state has been exceedingly Republican. In every single election over the last 56 years the state has given a higher percentage of its vote to the GOP candidate than he received in the nation as a whole, and in all but a few of those contests the Republican has run at least ten points better in Indiana than in the national popular vote.

Those older votes who have made the state deep red time and time again still delivered for John McCain this year, giving him their votes by a 24 point margin. But the segment of the electorate under the age of 30 gave Barack Obama its vote by an even wider 28 point spread.

In 2006 the state saw major gains for Democrats in its Congressional delegation, and in 2008 the new generation of voters gave Barack Obama a surprising victory in the state. The Democratic trend of younger voters in the state and the aging of the most consistently Republican ones has the potential to make Democratic Presidential victories in the future more of a regular thing than the novelty it was last year.

Nevada:

Nevada saw one of the largest movements in the country between 2004 and 2008, going from voting for George W. Bush to not only electing Barack Obama, but giving him a surprisingly high 12 point margin of victory.

Although the state did vote for Bill Clinton twice, he didn’t earn better than 44% of the vote either time and other than those two instances it had not voted Democratic since the Johnson landslide of 1964. The older voters who helped make it such a consistently Republican state over the years voted that way again in 2008, giving John McCain their vote by 13 points.

Younger voters in the state, however, went for Obama by 13 points. The Democratic youth movement is also being fueled by the increase in the state’s Hispanic vote. Even just from 2004 to 2008 their share of the electorate increased from 10% to 15%, and last year they gave their votes to Obama by a 76-22 margin. It seems safe to say it won’t be another 44 years before a Democrat gets over 50% of the vote in the state.

Polling the Broncos

Broncos fans are relatively divided over whether firing Mike Shanahan was the right thing to do, Public Policy Polling's newest survey finds, but they're also pretty supportive of the hiring of Josh McDaniels.

43% of self described Broncos fans surveyed supported firing Shanahan, with 31% opposed.

48% of fans approve of the hiring of Josh McDaniels with only 10% disapproving and 42% still unsure. A roughly 5:1 approval rating for a newly hired football coach is pretty darn good.

It's worth noting that even among fans who disagreed with the decision to fire Shanahan, McDaniels gets pretty good marks with 44% approving of the hire and 16% in opposition.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Broncos' youngest fans are most supportive of one of the youngest coaches in NFL history, with 67% of them approving of the hiring and only 9% unhappy with it.

It is also perhaps worth noting that the 42% of respondents unsure what to think of McDaniels is lower than the 45% of voters in our poll released earlier this week who didn't have an opinion about new Senator Michael Bennet.

Pat Bowlen had to make some tough decisions over the last five weeks but it appears he has the team's fan base mostly behind the choices he made.

Full results here

Immigration concerns fall News&Observer

Broncos fans mostly supportive of new coach

Topline results are below. Full results, including crosstabs, can be found here.

Q1 Did you approve or disapprove of the Broncos’
decision to fire Mike Shanahan? If you
approved, press 1. If you disapproved, press
2. If you’re not sure, press 3.
Approve .......................................................... 43%
Disapprove...................................................... 31%
Not Sure.......................................................... 26%

Q2 Do you approve or disapprove of the hire of
Josh McDaniels as the Broncos’ new coach? If
you approve, press 1. If you disapprove, press
2. If you’re not sure, press 3.
Approve .......................................................... 48%
Disapprove...................................................... 10%
Not Sure.......................................................... 42%

More on Virginia

I am excited for our first Virginia Democratic primary poll, which we'll conduct over the weekend and probably release on Tuesday.

One thing that we're going to do is break down the results by whether respondents are natives of Virginia or not. I'm very interested to see if attitudes toward Terry McAuliffe differ significantly along those lines. It would not be surprising to find that his fellow transplants are much more open to his candidacy than natives of the state. When we broke down a poll this way last August we found that 49% of Virginia Democrats were not born in the state, so it is certainly a significant constituency.

We'll also be interested to see if McAuliffe's early television push in the Hampton Roads area is paying any dividends. It's a logical place to start his advertising campaign since neither he, Creigh Deeds, or Brian Moran has a natural base there. It didn't take long for the media campaigns to start making a big difference in the Democratic primary for Governor of North Carolina last year, even at a similarly early stage in the campaign. If McAuliffe is already seeing his numbers rise there it could be an indication that his spending ability may make it tough for his opponents to compete.

Should be interesting!

Our Polling on the Smoking Ban

We're due for an update, but when the bill banning smoking in restaurants was up in the General Assembly two years ago we found that 67% of voters supported it. There wasn't much of a partisan divide on it either, with 68% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans in support.

I think our friends at Civitas know there's no way they can word a poll question to get the voters of the state to oppose the smoking ban because instead of asking about that on their poll this month they asked a question about whether a bill should be passed allowing restaurants to determine their own smoking policies.

That's fine, but the House Majority Leader is not vigorously pushing such a bill and when it comes down to whether the voters of the state support his proposal, they do by a wide margin.

Elon found the same thing two years ago.

All that said, I went to the Civitas luncheon today and appreciated their fine hospitality and entertaining program. I'll have some more thoughts on their findings later.

Democratic Senate Primary

I've had several people ask me when we're going to do a poll seeing how Roy Cooper and Heath Shuler would do against each other in a primary.

The answer, I hope, is never. It's really hard for me to imagine the two of them both running for the seat. Each has a perfectly good gig now that they can keep for as long as they want. With some exceptions, losing in the primary isn't usually very good for your future career.

I would imagine if Cooper wants to be the nominee, he's going to be the nominee. Some other folks might run in the primary, like happened against Kay Hagan last year, but I don't imagine anyone of much stature who could run a particularly strong campaign doing that.

If Cooper passes, it seems like it would be Shuler's for the taking.

But I'd be very surprised if they didn't resolve this between themselves, so we won't be doing any polling on that unless it somehow becomes a reality.

We'll test a third candidate against Richard Burr in February and I'll post a thread for your suggestions closer to the time.

Poll: Ritter takes hit among Hispanic voters Colorado Independent