Question:
Suppose that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney became the Republican nominee and was running against Democrat Barack Obama in the general election for President. If the election were being held today and these were the candidates for whom would you vote for President – Republican Mitt Romney or Democrat Barack Obama?

Obama: 54%
Perry: 35%

About this Poll
The findings in this report are based on a Field Poll survey completed September 1-12, 2011 among a random sample of 1,001 registered voters in California, including 333 registered Republicans.

Interviewing was conducted by telephone in English and Spanish using live interviewers working from Field Research Corporation’s central location telephone interviewing facilities. Up to six attempts were made to reach, screen and interview each randomly selected voter on different days and times of day during the interviewing period.

Interviewing was completed on either a voter’s landline phone or a cell phone depending on the source of the telephone listing from the voter file. After the completion of interviewing, the overall registered voter sample was weighted to Field Poll estimates of the characteristics of the registered voter population in California by region, age, gender and party registration.

Sampling error estimates applicable to the results of any probability-based survey depend on sample size as well as the percentage distribution being examined. The maximum sampling error estimates for results based on the overall registered voters sample is +/- 3.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, while findings based on the sample of registered Republicans have a maximum sampling error of +/- 5.6 percentage points. The maximum sampling error is based on results in the middle of the sampling distribution (i.e., percentages at or near 50%). Percentages at either end of the distribution (those closer to 10% or 90%) have a smaller margin of error.

There are other potential sources of error in surveys besides sampling error. However, the overall design and execution of the survey sought to minimize these other possible sources of error.