Topline results are below. Full results, including crosstabs, can be found here.
Q1 Do you approve or disapprove of President Barack Obama’s job performance? If you approve, press 1. If you disapprove, press 2. If you’re not sure, press 3. Approve .......................................................... 52% Disapprove...................................................... 42% Not Sure.......................................................... 5%
Q2 Do you think that Governor Bev Perdue has been attentive to Charlotte since taking office? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2. If you don’t know, press 3. Yes ................................................................. 25% No ................................................................... 58% Don't Know ..................................................... 17%
Bev Perdue opened an office in Charlotte and has made a point of visiting the city, but voters there still don't think she's been attentive to them since taking office.
58% of voters feel she's been inattentive to the city's needs so far, while just 25% think she has been. It's no surprise that 77% of Republicans and 63% of independents feel that way but even among Democrats 42% think she should be doing more for Charlotte while only 37% feel like she's done a good job so far on that front.
Perdue's overall rating with Charlotte voters, at 32% approval and 52% disapproval, is actually better than her statewide numbers. That may not be saying much though given what a Democratic city it is. 48% of Democrats, 28% of independents, and 11% of Republicans give her positive marks.
Perdue has a long way to go if she hopes to replicate her surprise victory in the city last year in 2012.
Much more popular with Charlotteans is Barack Obama, who has a 52% approval rating with 42% disapproving of his job performance in the city. 84% of Democrats, 48% of independents, and 9% of Republicans give him good reviews.
Obama's basically been pursuing a swing state strategy in the places he's visited since taking office, so who knows, maybe we'll see him in Charlotte for Anthony Foxx sometime during early voting. Given that his approval runs 17 points ahead of Foxx's vote share with independents, a visit from him could prove to be decisive in what's shaping up as a very close race.
Topline results are below. Full results, including crosstabs, can be found here.
Q1 If the candidates for Mayor this fall were Democrat Anthony Foxx and Republican John Lassiter, who would you vote for? If Anthony Foxx, press 1. If John Lassiter, press 2. If you’re undecided, press 3. Foxx................................................................ 43% Lassiter ........................................................... 44% Undecided....................................................... 13%
Q2 Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Anthony Foxx? If favorable, press 1. If unfavorable, press 2. If you're not sure, press 3. Approve .................. 48% Disapprove.............. 22% Not Sure.................. 31%
The race to be the next mayor of Charlotte is a statistical dead heat, with Republican John Lassiter leading Democrat Anthony Foxx 44-43 in the contest to replace Pat McCrory.
Both candidates are pretty popular with the city's electorate. 53% have a favorable opinion of Lassiter, with only 22% viewing him negatively and 48% have a positive one of Foxx with 22% holding an unfavorable opinion of him as well. It's unusual in the increasingly polarized world of partisan politics to see both candidates in a race sporting a better than 2:1 positive favorability ratio.
There are two key groups of voters who may well decide this race: independents and the Democratic voters whose crossover support of Pat McCrory has allowed the Republican to remain mayor of the Democratic city for over a decade. Lassiter has a 47-31 lead with independents, but Foxx has the 59-30 advantage with Democrats who approve of McCrory's job performance, indicating that he will do a better job of locking up his party's vote than recent Democratic nominees have.
Voters send conflicting messages about the direction of the city. On one hand McCrory has an excellent 57% approval rating, something that should aid Lassiter, who likely would be an extension of the current administration. On the other hand 59% of voters say that it's time for change in how the city is led with only 34% saying they're happy with how things are going currently, a sentiment that Foxx's campaign should be able to successfully tap into.
So far in the campaign Lassiter has put a heavy emphasis on his experience, while Foxx has been more focused on his vision for the city. By a 60-28 margin voters say that they are more concerned about a candidate's vision when deciding who to vote for than his experience.
Here are two things each candidate needs to focus on to win:
Anthony Foxx
-One very good piece of news for Foxx is that black voters appear to be motivated to come out this fall- we expect them to make up at least 30% of the electorate. Right now Foxx has a 70-17 lead with them. If he can push that up closer to Obama levels- 90% or more- he's going to be very difficult to beat.
-Although he's certainly doing a better job than most Democratic candidates for mayor have done lately of locking up the white Democratic vote, he's still losing 25% of it to Lassiter at this point. Getting his party more unified around him would go a long way.
John Lassiter
-Right now he's only getting 62% of the vote from people who approve of Pat McCrory's job performance. If he can do more to convince those folks happy with the current leadership that he'll provide continuity his numbers will improve.
-Do a better job of earning support from voters who have a favorable opinion of both him and Foxx- right now the Democrat has a 57-36 lead with their mutual admirers but conceivably those are folks who could go either way- Lassiter needs to get more of them to go his way.
This race looks like it will probably be close right to the end.
-Former Lieutenant Governor Dennis Wicker is the latest to join the possible Democratic candidates for Senate parade. Wicker has one very big positive: he's raised far more money than any of the other candidates publicly eying the race. On the negative side he lost the primary he raised all that money for by a wide margin and hasn't been in the public eye for almost a decade. Overall, given that this race is probably going to determined #1) by Barack Obama's popularity and #2) by the extent to which Richard Burr can be painted as ineffective and excessively partisan, Wicker would be a perfectly competent nominee. I feel the same way about the other Dems looking at the race too.
-We're scheduled to poll New Jersey next weekend but we're going to do Arkansas instead. NJ is getting polled plenty and there's a lot of curiosity about the impact everything going on right now is having on Blanche Lincoln's situation.
-Here's a key number from the Charlotte poll we're releasing tomorrow: Anthony Foxx leads John Lassiter 59-30 with Democrats who approve of Pat McCrory's job performance. Those folks made McCrory's long tenure as the Republican mayor of a Democratic city possible, and could be the swing voters who determine the winner this fall.
-Here are some initial observations from our weekend polling:
*The Mountain West has birthers too: among our first 182 Colorado respondents 94 said they thought Barack Obama was born in the United States, 44 said they thought he wasn't, and 44 said they weren't sure.
*Is there a divide in the birther ranks? Our national poll so far finds them nearly evenly split on whether think Obama was born in Indonesia or Kenya.
You would have seen this all already if you were following us on Twitter.
Jim Morrill reports on dueling polls between Anthony Foxx and John Lassiter in Charlotte.
The Cornerstone Solutions poll showing Lassiter with a 16 point lead is clearly not rooted in reality. It's not clear to me that this group has done any public polling before and they may not have mastered the concept of weighting yet: in a city where 33% of the population is black we would expect the African American share of the electorate in a municipal election to fall somewhere in the 27-33% range rather than the 14% cited in this poll.
Simply taking their data and reweighting it for an electorate that is 65% white, 30% black, and 5% other you would find Lassiter with a five point lead, well within the margin of error.
And that of course doesn't take into account the highly unlikely finding in the poll that Foxx is earning just 41% of the Democratic vote while Lassiter has already locked up 79% of the Republican vote.
I see a lot of bad polls, but I think this is the worst one I've seen in a long time.
Full disclosure, we placed robocalls for Foxx during his reelection campaign. But if a Democratic oriented group with no track record put out a shoddy poll showing him with a 16 point lead I'd say the same thing.
Ancedotally Bev Perdue has been getting good reviews in Charlotte since she took office. But the statistics back it up too.
Perdue's approval rating in the region has been better than it is overall statewide on our last three polls. In February she was at +11 statewide but +17 in Charlotte. In March it was +9 throughout the state and +13 in Charlotte. Our most recent survey showed a +1 for everyone and a +4 in Charlotte. On average that means she's doing four points better in the region than she is in North Carolina as a whole.
That's somewhat surprising. Our analysis in February showed that Perdue won every tv market in the state last fall except Charlotte where she lost 57-41.
Her strong standing there speaks to her outreach efforts since the election, but it may speak to something else as well: the results in greater Charlotte last year probably had a lot more to do with people liking Pat McCrory than they did with them disliking Bev Perdue. There may have been some 95th percentile followers of politics who really gave thought to the possibility of eastern North Carolina benefiting at the expense of Charlotte if Perdue was elected, but I think for the most part folks just knew McCrory and liked him rather than the region's vote really being an indictment of the Governor.
When I was in the 'waiting room' to go on the Tara Servatius show on WBT in Charlotte this afternoon I heard an ad in which former state senator Bob Rucho, running to take back his old seat, pilloried his opponent, Charlotte City Councilman Andy Dulin, for pretty much any bad thing the Charlotte City Council has done in the last few years.
He attacked him for raising taxes, for some some sort of taxpayer funded junket, and some other things I don't remember.
The ad was a little over the top, but it sure got me to wondering. Why is a Charlotte City Councilman being attacked in paid media for his record as a public official, but the Mayor of Charlotte, Pat McCrory, running for Governor, is not?
I think Fred Smith or Bill Graham, who have money, need to take a page from the Rucho playbook if they want to have any chance of defeating McCrory.
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