PPP's newest poll of Ohio finds Barack Obama with a narrow advantage in the state, at 48% to 45% for Mitt Romney. Obama's three point lead is unchanged from PPP's last survey there in late June.
Ohio provides a good illustration of how disgusted voters are with both of their serious choices in this election. They are not happy with the job Obama's doing, giving him a 46% approval rating with 51% of voters disapproving. But he leads anyway because folks are even less enamored with Romney- just 41% have a favorable opinion of him to 52% who see him negatively.
This poll was taken Thursday-Sunday, straddling Romney's announcement of Paul Ryan as his running mate. We found Ohio voters to be split three ways on Ryan with 34% rating him favorably, 33% unfavorably, and 33% having no opinion. Republicans (61/6) like him more than Democrats (11/52) dislike him, but independents split against him 32/43. For now his selection looks like a wash but we'll see how it unfolds.
Obama (83% of Democrats) and Romney (85% of Republicans) are getting similar levels of support from their respective party bases. Obama's lead is thanks to a 49/39 lead with independents who in addition to disliking Ryan also have an extremely dim view of Romney (34/57 favorability.)
Brown's up 15 points with independents, 46-31. It's important to note that while Brown's at 79% of the Democratic vote right now, Mandel's at just 71% with Republicans. That means he has more room for growth in the closing months of the campaign and that it will probably get closer again.
Ohio is leaning Democratic right now but especially at the Presidential level it's very close and it's hard to characterize it as anything other than a swing state.
Full results here
Your poll does not include Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or Virgil Goode, all of whom are on the ballot in Ohio. Your results are therefore invalid.
Posted by: Matthew Reece | August 14, 2012 at 01:05 PM
Good news (but still too close for comfort.)
Not that I believe them but it's a little disconcerting that both of the daily trackers have Romney up today. (Gallup R+2, Ras R+3)
Posted by: Obama 2012 | August 14, 2012 at 02:05 PM
I just saw another poll that had Ryan at 51% favorability in Ohio, so I have a simple question for you: What are the demographic partisan break down of this poll. I've seen pollsters in recent weeks juice their numbers to push an agenda by oversampling Dems. If your polls has a sample split of Dem 40%, Rep 20%, Ind 40%, then it means nothing, since that type of voting % is preposterous. What is your sample breakdown: Dems vs Reps vs Ind??
Posted by: Smooth Jazz | August 14, 2012 at 05:11 PM
Smooth Jazz:
You will find the words "Full results here" directly above the comments. The word "here" is a hyper-link.
Surprisingly, it takes you to the full results. This includes the partisan breakdown.
It's weird, because this isn't the first time you've been here to comment. All of this time you've apparently been commenting on polls that you never read, because you never saw the link to the results.
You may also wish to brush up on the concept of "weighting", which would illuminate these "preposterous" samples for you from other pollsters.
It seems pretty common for the wingnuts who comment here to completely miss that link. It never stops them from dismissing the poll, even though they had not seen the results when they commented.
Posted by: Todd Dugdale | August 14, 2012 at 06:08 PM
"Not that I believe them but it's a little disconcerting that both of the daily trackers have Romney up today. (Gallup R+2, Ras R+3)"
You SHOULD be worried. Gallup & Ras are polling hundeds of people daily and are measuring the daily contours of the race. Most important, the daily trackers have partisan breakdowns that are more representative of who will vote in Sep (ie Dem 35%, Rep, 33%, Ind 32%).
All these other media polls like Pew, CNN, NBC, Reuters el al are bogus because they over sample Dems to juice the numbers in Obamas favor to push an agenda. For examle, the Pew, CNN, Fox, NBC & Reuters polls have more Dems voting than Repubs by amounts ranging from Dem +20 to Dem +10. That AINT gonna happen. Too many Repub psyched about voting this year.
Posted by: Smooth Jazz | August 14, 2012 at 06:36 PM
Smooth Jazz-- The crosstabs show 40-D, 37-R, 24-I. This is probably a nearly perfect sample for the state of Ohio (due to the "contested" nature of almost all races here, there really are not many people who are truly independent voters).
Posted by: Steve Stauffer | August 14, 2012 at 06:39 PM
Matthew: Yeah, they're not, and they'll probably get about 1%, between them. It's not very meaningful.
Smooth Jazz: It's actually in the pdf file: 40D, 37R, 24I.
Posted by: Joe | August 14, 2012 at 08:02 PM
Dear Jazzy, please learn to read. You see at the bottom where it says "Full results here"? If you click on the word 'here' you can see the partisan breakdown all by yourself.
Also, there's little point polling people whose best-case scenario fails to reach the margin of error, so including Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or Virgil Goode is a fairly pointless exercise. Johnson and Goode might draw from Romney as disaffected Republicans vote for them, Stein might get 0.1% if she's lucky (since Democrats still recall how Nader played spoiler in 2000 and largely aren't ready to make that mistake again), and otherwise it's not going to make a notable dent in the toplines.
Posted by: NRH | August 15, 2012 at 02:06 PM
Smmoth Jazz wrote:
" the daily trackers have partisan breakdowns that are more representative of who will vote in Sep (ie Dem 35%, Rep, 33%, Ind 32%)."
How many people do you think will be voting in September? the election is in November.
Again, weighting for partisan ID is a bad idea. PPP doesn't do that; they weight for other things that are stable.
Posted by: Todd Dugdale | August 16, 2012 at 08:41 AM