Barack Obama has no chance of winning Nebraska next year. His approval rating in the state is 35% with 61% of voters disapproving of him. The only places where PPP has found him to be more unpopular are Utah, Wyoming, and West Virginia. Part of the problem is his having pretty much no support from Republicans in a Republican heavy state but even with Democrats his approval is a much lower than usual 68%.
Obama trails Mitt Romney by 13 points at 51-38, Ron Paul by 10 at 47-37, Michele Bachmann by 8 at 49-41, and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry each by 7 points at 48-41. Those margins are all closer than Obama's 15 point loss statewide in 2008 but they don't point to much potential for him to pull a big upset. The strongest Republican in Nebraska actually would have been Chris Christie, who led Obama 51-36 on this poll. Christie did better than any other Republican on the North Carolina poll we released this morning as well but of course that ship has sailed.
That move is having the impact Republicans hoped it would in the 2nd district- Romney leads Obama 50-42 there and Perry has a 48-44 advantage as well. But in a finding that can certainly go into the 'unintended consequences' file Obama is now up 45-44 on Romney in the new 1st District and leads Perry by a 47-41 margin. Now it's important to note that the margin of error for the numbers in each of these individual Congressional districts is pretty high, but still, Obama would be trailing Romney in both the 1st and 2nd districts under the old lines.
Obama may yet have a chance to win an electoral vote in Nebraska. And voters in the state overwhelmingly favor keeping their current quirky system for allocating electoral votes- 51% prefer the status quo to only 31% who favor a shift to winner take all. Republicans (43/35) do narrowly favor making the change but both Democrats (17/66) and independents (22/68) strongly oppose it.
Obama's not going to win Nebraska but even here the numbers show the extent to which he may eventually be bailed out by the weakness of the Republican candidate field. A plurality of voters have a negative opinion of every GOPer we tested- 35/47 for Romney, 30/49 for Bachmann, 31/52 for Gingrich, 26/50 for Paul, and 28/53 for Perry. It's not a good sign if you're a Republican that all your candidates are under water in a deep red state like Nebraska.
Full results here
I thought PPP was not able to poll individual congressional districts?
Posted by: Zathras | October 06, 2011 at 03:24 PM
It just doesn't -- unless the state is Maine or Nebraska, where Congressional districts count.
Posted by: pbrower2a | October 06, 2011 at 05:55 PM
Even in Nebraska, Obama wins the 45-and-under vote against almost all comers (with nonfactor Christie in a clear lead in the 30-45 circuit and Romney in an effective tie with them, and Obama winning every other combination). He wins the non-white vote by landslide margins (though in Nebraska that's not much of a factor). The years to come will not be kind to Republicans, even in states currently as deeply mired in Republican madness as Nebraska.
If you were 16 years old (and just starting to pay attention to politics, if you started fairly early) in 1992, then you're now 35 and have seen two competent Democratic presidents being relentlessly and obsessively attacked by frothing Republicans, and one disaster of a Republican presidency, and have watched the Republicans degenerate into an increasingly insane and monolithic orthodoxy in general. It's no wonder that the next two generations of voters are dedicated Democrats. Give it another two or three electoral cycles and a large proportion of the Republicans' largest demographic base will have, to put it genteelly, left the voting population.
Posted by: NRH | October 06, 2011 at 06:30 PM
Is there any particular reason that your results are somewhat skewed by CD? (That is, 41% of respondents on from the 1st CD, 30% from the 2nd CD, and 29% from the 3rd CD.)
I checked the 2008 results, and found that voters were (roughly) 34.5% in the 1st/2nd and 30% in the 3rd CD, which is rather more uniform. It's not a huge discrepancy, though, and the changing lines likely had something to do with it.
Posted by: Sophie | October 06, 2011 at 07:53 PM
No, we can poll really anything, but we don't usually poll individual districts unless it's in small states like NE because it's hard to get a suitable sample in each district when there're more than three or four in a state. And usually it's, like here, just a matter of using respondents' congressional districts as a crosstab for questions asked of everyone statewide, not asking different questions in different districts, which is much more complicated to do.
Posted by: Dustin Ingalls | October 07, 2011 at 01:38 AM
Well said NRH.
It's clear to any reasonably intelligent informed person that the Republican Party is a disaster for the United States.
Posted by: Obama 2012 | October 07, 2011 at 12:51 PM
Can you clarify whether you asked people what congressional district they lived in -- old and new -- or used separate call lists to call different voters.
Because if the former, it sounds like you're placing an extremely heavy reliance on voters to know what congressional district they live in. That's not always a safe assumption, even for districts that have been around for 10 years; but it's even less safe for new districts that have never actually had a congressional vote yet.
Posted by: RR | October 07, 2011 at 02:32 PM
"Can you clarify whether you asked people what congressional district they lived in -- old and new -- or used separate call lists to call different voters."
Neither. Obviously people don't know the number of the district in which they live. But we didn't call each district separately either. We knew which respondents were in which district, and created a "question" in our stat software based on that, in order to cross the other questions with each district.
Posted by: Dustin Ingalls | October 11, 2011 at 01:54 PM