Obama's Lead Over Palin and Romney Among Young Voters Shrinks

[Poundingtherock]

http://www.iop.harvard.edu/var/ezp_site/storage/fckeditor/file/101021_IOP_Fall_10%20Report_FINAL.pdf

He's up 25 on Palin and Romney among 18-29 year olds even though he won them by 34 in 2008.

Palin does better than Romney among 18-29 indies.

[Dgov]

Interesting that in a sample that is 37% Liberal versus 34% Conservative, they only prefer Democratic control of Congress by 11 points, 53-42.  It suggests that the fact that the more Millennial describing themselves as Liberal is offset in some way from their actual partisan leanings.  If you took a random sample of the population that had that ideological makeup, the Democrats would probably be winning at least 60-35.

Although this poll supports Gallup's Notion that the Democrat's biggest loss since 2008 has been with Hispanics, who support a Democratic Congress only 4 points more than the group as a whole.  I'm willing to bet Obama did better with young Hispanics than older ones too (both as a general trend and the fact that older Hispanics are more likely to be wealthy suburbanites), which suggests that support for the Republicans is up 10 points or more compared to 2008.

Finally, the long-confirmed trend of voters liking Generic Republicans more than Specific ones is shown here, where actual Republicans under perform generic ones by about 12 points.  Though this might also be due to the fact that only unpopular, high-profile Republicans were mentioned.

[Poundingtherock]

But a generic democrat also outperformed Obama against a generic republican in 2008. Generally, America is a country that likes conservative Democrats.  Somewhat culturally conservative, supportive of tax cuts, smaller government but reticent about giving up entitlement programs.  Americans flip-flop on foreign policy depending on the progress of the war at issue.

So it's not a big deal that Palin and Romney underperform the generic ballot because specific people always underperform the generic ballot.

[Poundingtherock]

If Obama doesn't win 60% of the 18-29 vote in 2012, it's pretty much curtains for him.

The best case scenario for a Republican in a presidential election is to perform as well as Bush did in the suburbs in 2004 while performing as well as Republicans are performing in 2009-2010 in rural areas.  If you look at the Virginia map, I read that McDonnell matched Bush's performance in the suburbs and outperformed him dramatically in rural areas.  The max for a republican win is probably around 7 points against Obama.