VA-Marist/MSNBC: Obama strongly favored to win

[pbrower2a]

In view of Ohio, in a State (Virginia) that has gone for the Democratic nominee for President only twice in the last sixty years...

Ohio and Virginia are different enough that the two Marist polls suggest a national trend to a GOP disaster in November.

[pbrower2a]

What, did they only poll Richmond?

If Virginia is close in November, how does Moneybags Mitt fare in Fairfax? How would Obama, on the flipside, do in SW VA (the Gore/Kerry-->McCain areas)

Watch for polls of states demographically similar southwestern Virginia -- Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and of course West Virginia. We have seen few credible polls from those states in recent months.  Should President Obama be picking up the sorts of voters who went for Bill Clinton in the 1990s but not for him while he holds onto the suburban voters that Republicans used to think his, then he is on the way to at least an Eisenhower-scale landslide.

The gains in Ohio could be among voters of that type -- the Reagan-Clinton Democrats. Who knows?  

[pbrower2a]

What, did they only poll Richmond?

If Virginia is close in November, how does Moneybags Mitt fare in Fairfax? How would Obama, on the flipside, do in SW VA (the Gore/Kerry-->McCain areas)

Watch for polls of states demographically similar southwestern Virginia -- Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and of course West Virginia. We have seen few credible polls from those states in recent months.  Should President Obama be picking up the sorts of voters who went for Bill Clinton in the 1990s but not for him while he holds onto the suburban voters that Republicans used to think his, then he is on the way to at least an Eisenhower-scale landslide.

The gains in Ohio could be among voters of that type -- the Reagan-Clinton Democrats. Who knows?  

Lol!

That is an easily testable hypothesis.

[pbrower2a]

So what would that translate to if adjusted for reality?  Maybe Obama ahead by 2-3 points in Virginia and even in Ohio?

Depends what we define as "reality".

If we use the Marist crosstabs and apply them to the 2008 Exit Polls in OH and VA, the results are:

OH (39%D, 31%R, 30%I): 49% Obama, 40% Romney

VA (39%D, 33%R, 28%I): 50% Obama, 40% Romney

But because the crosstabs show that Obama gets a higher Democratic share than Romney gets among his own party and Obama also leads among Independents, the sample could even be R+2 and Obama would still lead ...

It is the moderates, and not the bases, who decide who win most elections.  This is especially true with Presidential elections. Alf Landon got 36% of the popular vote in 1936; McGovern got 37% of the popular vote in 1972. In an essentially binary election (unless something freakish like a sudden scandal that discredits someone) the incumbent is going to win a a floor of roughly 40% of the vote (Hoover 1932, Carter 1980) and the challenger is going to have a floor of about 36% of the vote.

The marked partisans have decided between 72% and 76% of the vote before a vote is cast. The other 24% to 28% of the electorate decide it all.

If President Obama were the disaster as partisan hacks on the Right see him, then he would now be losing binary matchups in a bunch of states that he won in 2008.

If he is legitimately up by double-digit margins in Ohio and Virginia, states close to the national average in their voting habits, then President Obama is headed to a landslide re-election. Whether such reflects the effectiveness of the President or the ineptitude of his likely challengers isn't so clear. It is now too late for anyone to enter the race to be the Republican nominee for President and win. If the Republicans have a disordered convention in which a nominee is selected in some proverbial smoke-filled room, then that nominee will have a tough time getting his message across.

Polls are stills in a movie, and not the conclusion. But we already know President Obama very well; we know what he believes; we know how he campaigns; we know from 2008 what sort of campaign apparatus a Republican nominee faces.     

[pbrower2a]

Marist also had Obama losing  NH a while back and it was fine then.

Technically -- President Obama was winning New Hampshire against everyone but Romney, often by double-digit margins... when the Republicans were campaigning all the time, smearing the President at every turn. Then they left after the primary, and New Hampshire went back to normal. There has been only one poll of New Hampshire since the primary, and in contrast to the frequent polls before the primary it shows Romney losing. It makes sense in view of the disappearance of the barrage of calumnies against the President and the results of the 2008 election.