By Dave Andrusko
Here’s some of the latest in the close-as-you-can-get presidential contest between the pro-life team of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and the pro-abortion team of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, beginning with the least surprising.
Rasmussen asked 1,000 likely voters about the media. Here’s the opening summary paragraph:
“Most voters think President Obama has gotten better treatment from the media than Mitt Romney has, and they expect that biased coverage to continue. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters believe Obama has received the best treatment from the media so far. Just 18% think his Republican challenger has been treated better. Twenty-three percent (23%) aren’t sure.”
Less surprising is that for the first time since July 18, Romney leads Obama in Gallup’s Daily Tracking Poll, 47% to 45%. They were tied Saturday when Romney chose Ryan.
More surprising is what John Zogby of JZ Analytics told Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner: that in a weekend poll of 1,117 likely voters, Romney garnered 41% of the 18-29 year olds. Obama received 49%. In 2008, Obama carried 66% of this vote, according to Bedard.
Then there is the fascinating results of a Suffolk University/USA Today poll reported on today by USA Today’s Susan Page. Page’s lead is
“A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t likely to do so finds that these stay-at-home Americans back Obama’s re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of them say they are registered to vote. Eight in 10 say the government plays an important role in their lives.”
The number 90 million gets kicked around, although that’s just a guess. Dig a little deeper and it gets more interesting and a little less apocalyptic.
Almost 80 million eligible citizens didn’t vote in 2008 when turnout was the highest since 1960. Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate told Page turnout “could ebb to levels similar to 2000, when only 54.2% of those eligible to vote cast a ballot.”
According to Page 2/3rds of the unlikely voters did vote in 2008, favoring Obama by more than 2-1 over John McCain.
Then there is this paragraph: “The ranks of eligible non-voters lean toward the Democratic candidate in most though not all election years. The Democratic tilt among them is much greater in this survey than it was in 2004 or 2008 in the Gallup Poll just before Election Day. Then, Democrats had the advantage in voter enthusiasm — an asset they’ve lost this year.”
You have to ask yourself could the tilt possibly be THAT large—43% to 20% among registered voters and 43% to 14% among those who are unregistered? And if it is, it lends credence to all the stories that we’ve run about polls that show superior Republican enthusiasm.
The story could also be read both as a tsk-tsk diatribe against supposedly ill-informed electorate, on the one hand, and as an understanding that this is what you can expect when the election is so “negative.” The story ends with the response to the question of what would get supporters to actually vote: “The survey identified one extremely persuasive argument. Among Obama supporters, 85% say they would go to the polls if they knew their vote would help swing a close election to the president; 70% of Romney supporters say the same for their candidate.”
One final piece—voter registration in eight key battleground states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The Democratic think tank “Third Way” has a new report saying that Democratic voter registration is down by more than 800,000 from 2008 (Republicans are down only 79,000) while the number of Independents has risen by almost a half-million.
“What’s most interesting about the Florida data is where the independents’ growth is taking place – among Hispanics,” observes POLITICO’s Charles Mahtesian. “The state has seen a surge in the percentage of Hispanic voters over the past four years – 14.4 percent – and, according to the Third Way report, ‘nearly as many Hispanic voters have registered as independents as have registered as Democrats or Republicans combined.’”
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