The Candidates
Some worrisome news out of my state, where Obama is up by 13 on McCain.
University of Wisconsin/WisPolitics Wisconsin General Election
- Barack Obama 50%
- John McCain 37%
The survey of 506 randomly selected probable voters was conducted by phone from June 8- June 10 under the direction of Charles Franklin and Ken Goldstein from the University of Wisconsin Department of Political Science (www.polisci.wisc.edu). It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
Before this is dismissed as an outlier, the poll was conducted by Professor Franklin at UW, who also runs the highly reputable Pollster.com. He’s a very impressive guy, he gave a lecture on polling at my university last year. Even still it is significantly at odds with the Rasmussen poll the other day showing Obama up by only 2 points.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Don’t worry LJ. Karl Rove has said for a while that Obama would get a good 8-10 point bounce after he wrapped
up the Democrat nomination. The more the stories and scandals get out, the more his numbers will fall back to earth.
June 12th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
I was watching Chris Matthews for a few minutes and he was talking about the new NBC/WSJ poll where 54%-42% is the split change over experience. Truthfully, that sounded to me like democratic primary voters. It made me wonder when everyone agreed this was a change election.
Obama has had change as his campaign mantra from the beginning, but the earliest I can recall the media picking up the theme was last year on MTP. Mike Murphy said it was a change election, that Obama had the right message and on that basis said Obama would win.
After Obama prevailed in IA “change” became the catchword. Romney started running on it and arguably won MI that way. McCain famously (and funnily) mocked Romney as the candidate of change. Giuliani also began talking about change in Florida, differentiating between what he called the right change from the wrong change. More and more the media adopted change as the theme for 2008. And having been told the election is about change, voters are now demanding it.
Perhaps himself feeling the pressure, McCain came out as a candidate of change on the night Obama secured the nomination. That must have been sweet music to Obama’s ears, having already beaten a mini-quorum of more experienced senators. Think of it this way: McCain has positioned himself as the one type of candidate Obama spent 17 months running against. Would it not have been smarter to run as something else?
June 12th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dy6myWxg8
June 12th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
This is starting to sound like a broken record. Each cycle the Republicans express optimism in this state and each time they come up short. Wisconsin backed Dukakis during a time when getting elected as a republican was easy and has gone democrat in all subsequent elections.