McCrory leads Dalton by 7

A lot has gone on in the North Carolina Governor's race over the last month- attacks ads on both sides, lawsuit threats, salvos in the press...and the effect of this all on voters has been...basically none. The state of the race is exactly the same as it was a month ago.

Pat McCrory leads Walter Dalton 47-40, almost identical to his 46-40 advantage in May. The negative ads haven't really had any effect on the candidates' images either. McCrory's favorability this month is a +14 spread at 44/30, little different from last month's +13 at 41/28. There's been similarly little impact on Dalton. Last month he was at 28/26 and now he's at 28/28.

McCrory continues to be the favorite for a couple of key reasons. He's been persistently strong with independents and leads 47/31 with them this month. And his party is much more unified around him than Dalton's is- he's taking 83% of the Republican vote to Dalton's 68% of Democrats. Some party unity gap is to be expected in North Carolina because there are so many conservative Democrats, but it was only 7 points in our final poll of 2008.

There are some reasons for encouragement for Dalton in this poll. His post-primary bounce has sustained itself for the last month despite the negative ads being run against him. It seems unlikely that McCrory will return to the 15 point lead he started out the race with, or anything particularly close to it. McCrory's also losing his image as a centrist. 44% of voters think he would best be described as a conservative to only 27% who think he's a moderate. And the undecideds skew Democratic. 50% of them are supporting Barack Obama to 30% for Mitt Romney. If those folks ended up voting the same party for Governor that they are for President, it would bring Dalton within 4 points.

One outcome of a Republican leading at the top of the ticket could be tough times for some Democratic Council of State members seeking reelection. Incumbent Treasurer Janet Cowell leads challenger Steve Royal only 34-33, and Auditor Beth Wood is tied with her challenge Debra Goldman at 36%. In the other statewide race where the general election match up has been set Republican Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler has a commanding 45-31 lead over challenger Walter Smith.

Full results here

Comments

[Sophie]

I'm a bit concerned that most of your polls regarding the recent contests (Wisconsin gubernatorial race, Senate recalls, and AZ-08) were Democrat-biased by ~3-6 points. I realize that polling in special elections and recalls is an extremely difficult job, which you've done a stellar job with at the post, but I think it may be useful to do a postmortem analysis post, in which you assess the potential reasons for this.

I've tended to rely on PPP results to the exclusion of other pollsters in the past due to your stellar record, but I'm starting to worry that doing so this year will give me an overly optimistic view of the electoral battleground.

[John]

The Daily Kos actually looked into a possible bias for PPP using the 8 most recent elections (WI recall, 4 house special elections, 1 gov special election, and 2 gov elections in 2011). The average came to D+3.75 for those races, so I would say that there may be some kind of variable that PPP is not accounting for that's producing a bias.