Saturday, July 9, 2011

PPP Pennsylvania Polling

I'm wondering what to make of Mitt Romney's good head-to-head poll numbers against Barack Obama in a general election. PPP has him tied with Obama in Pennsylvania, which is much better than the other Republicans do. One set of questions has to do with the predictive value of these numbers for a general election. Another set has to do with explaining why Obama is trouble in a usually Democratic state. David Nir writes:
Tom thinks that "Hillary Democrats" are causing problems for the president, and while I think the evidence he cites is a little thin (74% approval among Dems, 70% among white Dems), I could still believe it. (As a completely irrelevant aside, I'm still amazed that Hillary Clinton, of all people, somehow turned into a touchstone for conservative, white, working class/blue collar Democrats.)
It might be better to think of these people as "Clinton Democrats". They liked Bill Clinton, and their likings transferred more naturally to Hillary than to Barack. Anyway, I'd assume that these people's voting behavior is pretty strongly affected by the state of the economy, so that's probably what I'd talk about first.

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