Poll: Presidential race tight in Va., Kaine holds slim lead over Allen
The presidential race in Virginia is a virtual dead heat and Democrat Tim Kaine holds a slight lead in the state’s closely watched U.S. Senate race, according to a new statewide poll released this morning.
The Quinnipiac University-New York Times-CBS News survey shows President Barack Obama with a statistically insignificant lead of 2 percentage points over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, 49 percent to 47 percent. Romney has gained ground since on Oct. 11 Quinnipiac poll that had Obama leading by 5 points, and most public opinion surveys released in the past week indicate that the key battleground state is up for grabs.
Romney will return to Virginia on Thursday, with campaign stops scheduled in Roanoke, Caroline County and Virginia Beach. First Lady Michelle Obama will campaign for the president Friday at Virginia State University in Petersburg and in Hampton.
In the Senate race, Kaine leads Republican George Allen by 4 percentage points, 50 percent to 46 percent. But the new poll shows Allen with an 18-point lead among self-described independent voters. That represents a wild swing from the Oct. 11 poll, which had independents favoring Kaine by 11 points.
Romney holds a 21-point lead over Obama among independents, according to the poll.
In Quinnipiac’s polling sample, 35 percent identified themselves as Democrat, 35 percent as independent and only 27 percent as Republican.
The results come from a telephone survey of 1,074 likely voters conducted between Oct. 23 and Sunday, before Hurricane Sandy began to lash the state. The poll has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
Half of the Virginia voters surveyed said they have been contacted by both of the presidential campaigns via letter, e-mail, telephone call or in person by a campaign worker. Another 14 percent said they have been contacted only by Romney’s campaign, and 12 percent only by Obama’s campaign.
The Virginia results are part of a Quinnipiac survey of three key swing states in the presidential election. The poll has Obama leading Romney in the battleground state Ohio by 5 points, 50 percent to 45 percent. Florida is a tossup in the Quinnipiac poll, with Obama at 48 percent and Romney at 47 percent.
– Michael Sluss
October 31, 2012 - 8:32 AM
For the future of our Country hope Governor Romney wins. I was a kid in 1980 and don’t remember much other than my parents gripping that President Carter was destroying the country. I think this election is much more important as I believe President Obama is much worse than President Carter, if that is possible. October 27, 1980 Gallup had Carter leading by 53% to 47%. As we all know Governor Reagan won in a land slide. Maybe just maybe history will repeat itself.
The headline of this story is so mis-leading. With all the polls out there, and most of them showing conflicting results, it puzzles me that anyone would give more than a shrug to any of them. We will know the true results soon enough.
Seriously Michael? Is Obama gonna “destroy America”? That is just what Democrats do isn’t it. Mommy and Daddy said so.
Obama was sent to Washington with an agenda that has ties back to the New Party and the DSA, which was proclaimed when he said “I want to fundamentally transform America”.
The Quinnipiac poll seems to always weight in favor of the democrats. I guess that’s why the RT uses it.
don’t you mean dead HEAT? Or, are we sitting around listening to the Grateful Dead and being mellow?
Typo is corrected. Thanks.
Obama was sent to Washington with a plurality of the vote and the electoral college to do what he told us he would do and the TP/R Party decided that they would disrupt the entire government to make him a one term President, see how you like it when the shoe is on the other foot.
Quinnipiac used a 9% weight to the democrats which is not accurate. Current projections of likely voters favor the GOP and independents are in Romneys camp. The Roanoke college poll seems about right. 5 points ahead for Romney…outside the margin of error. The RT will not tell you this, so I did.
We will certainly know soon enough who has been credible and who has not.
Another Chuck, you’re making that up. There’s nothing particularly credible about Roanoke’s poll, and there’s no chance Rmoney is up 5 points in this state. RCP has him up .5, well within the margin of error. But Romney needs Virginia to win…Obama doesn’t.
Quinnipiac is biased to Dems by about 4 points, so add +2 for each GOP, and -2 for each Dem and you will be within one point of the actual election results next week. RT never gets anything right.
Hey Mason, Dwayne and Mike, not that you won’t be busy next week but it would be refreshing to see a recap of these various polls and pollsters after the fact to confirm who was right and who was wrong.
According to Gallup: “Within each contacted household reached via landline, an interview is sought with an adult 18 years of age or older living in the household who has had the most recent birthday. (This is a method pollsters commonly use to make a random selection within households without having to ask the respondent to provide a complete roster of adults living in the household.) Gallup does not use the same respondent selection procedure when making calls to cell phones because they are typically associated with one individual rather than shared among several members of a household.
When respondents to be interviewed are selected at random, every adult has an equal probability of falling into the sample. The typical sample size for a Gallup poll, either a traditional stand-alone poll or one night’s interviewing from Gallup’s Daily tracking, is 1,000 national adults with a margin of error of ±4 percentage points. Gallup’s Daily tracking process now allows Gallup analysts to aggregate larger groups of interviews for more detailed subgroup analysis. But the accuracy of the estimates derived only marginally improves with larger sample sizes.
After Gallup collects and processes survey data, each respondent is assigned a weight so that the demographic characteristics of the total weighted sample of respondents match the latest estimates of the demographic characteristics of the adult population available from the U.S. Census Bureau. Gallup weights data to census estimates for gender, race, age, educational attainment, and region.”
http://www.gallup.com/poll/101872/how-does-gallup-polling-work.aspx
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-no-pollsters-are-not-conspiring-to-destroy-romney/2012/09/25/cf6c2af4-06fb-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_blog.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/polling-party-1173/
“I don’t believe that weighting by party identification is necessary or advisable,” said John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. “The overall balance of party identification in the electorate can fluctuate. There is no steady baseline against which to weight” — unlike Census data used to adjust surveys for demographic attributes such as age or gender.”
This is their livelihood, this is their company credibility on the line. Where is the up side in weighting polls to be incorrect?
One major problem is the opening statement, “via landlines”.
CBS news reports that only 1 in 4 Americans have a landline in 2012.
15 – True…and among those of us who still have landlines are working during the day when a lot of these calls are made.
Plus, there’s that little thing called “caller ID” – and after a long day’s work (being the the hard-working, productive, tax paying conservative that I am)…the last thing I’m going to do is answer the phone when it’s an unknown number.
The only poll that really matters is on Tuesday.
Four years ago, there was unprecedented enthusiasm surrounding the Obama campaign. He was the “hope” and the “change”, “the one”, etc…and he had a lame opponent in McCain. And he still only managed to capture 52.9% of the vote.
This year, the enthusiasm is on the other side. Romney is a much more formidable opponent. And Obama has a lousy economy and a record that he can’t run on. He’s lost a lot of the independents and moderates that helped him win last time. I predict a huge Romney win on Tuesday. I hope I’m right.