NJ: Eagleton-Rutgers: Corzine now 3 points ahead of Christie

[Tender Branson]

New Poll: New Jersey Governor by Eagleton-Rutgers on 2009-10-20

Summary: D: 39%, R: 36%, U: 5%

Poll Source URL: Full Poll Details


Corzine (D): 39%
Christie (R): 36%
Daggett (I): 20%

[Tender Branson]

I increasingly like what I see ...

Hopefully Daggett rises further and takes more Indies from Christie.

[Rowan]

They have a pretty bad track record FWIW. And Daggett at 20% is just absurd.

[Bacon King]

Hell, what if Daggett wins? Impossibly improbable, I know, but still.

[Former Moderate]

They have a pretty bad track record FWIW. And Daggett at 20% is just absurd.

They don't have any track record so far as I'm concerned.  This is Eagleton's first foray into polling in a long while, now under new management after previous (partisan) controversy.

[Stampever]

Jersey continues to be interesting.  At the rate these polls are going, we might not know who won until the next day once they've done a recount.

[Tender Branson]

They have a pretty bad track record FWIW. And Daggett at 20% is just absurd.

They don't have any track record so far as I'm concerned.  This is Eagleton's first foray into polling in a long while, now under new management after previous (partisan) controversy.

Partisan ? How so ? But not for the Democrats, I guess ?

FTR: They had Corzine winning by 6 in 2005 (he won by 10/11) and Menendez by 4 (he won by 9.

They always had many undecideds, not so in this poll ...

[Former Moderate]

They have a pretty bad track record FWIW. And Daggett at 20% is just absurd.

They don't have any track record so far as I'm concerned.  This is Eagleton's first foray into polling in a long while, now under new management after previous (partisan) controversy.

Partisan ? How so ? But not for the Democrats, I guess ?

FTR: They had Corzine winning by 6 in 2005 (he won by 10/11) and Menendez by 4 (he won by 9.

They always had many undecideds, not so in this poll ...

Actually, yeah, it was over Eagleton hiring a Democratic activist to run the polling.  One of the political science teachers resigned over it.  I found this searching at PolitickerNJ:

The problem for Eagleton is that the partisan affiliation of their polling director is one of the reasons they have lost their standing as New Jersey's premier political pollster.  In 2004, Rutgers hired Jeffrey Levine, a political consultant whose firm polled for Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt earlier that year and Democratic State Senate candidate Blair MacInnes the year before.  Levine's appointment triggered the resignation of Eagleton poll director Clifford Zukin, a Rutgers professor who says he quit because he didn't want to seek Eagleton become a Democratic or Republican polling shop.

The new guy running things at Eagleton is a Democrat too—and the former Director of the University of Iowa Hawkeye poll.

[OC]

Yeah, hopefully the provisional ballots will put Corzine over the top either on election day or soon after.
I think in the way of polling Rutgers is very similar to that of the R2K polling and hopefully, we will be getting some good news when those polls come out and they will mirror each other.

[Former Moderate]

FWIW, the Eagleton poll also inexplicably decides to rotate Daggett into the choices so he appears something other than last.  It seems like such a basic "do not do" that I'm surprised an otherwise reputable pollster would do it.

The crosstabs show that Christie voters have been following the campaign more closely than Corzine/Daggett voters, that virtually no Daggett voters have an excellent (0%) or good view (6%) of the legislature (which will impact Assembly races),  41% of voters give Corzine a "poor" rating on his time as Governor, 69% think the state is on the "wrong track," that Corzine actually comes in third in the exurbs and Christie comes in third in the urban areas, and that the voters who say they're voting for Daggett have Christie as a second choice (34–28).

A look at the undecideds:
Corzine is 5:2 unfavorable among undecided voters (Christie is net favorable by 3:2 amongst this subset).  The most important issue to undecideds is "taxes," said by a whopping 70%.  And regardless of their top issue, undecideds believe by 2:1 that Chris Christie would be better at solving their top issue than Jon Corzine.

If Corzine wins this, all logic will have been thrown out the window.