Research 2000 for Daily Kos (10/19-21, likely voters):
Bill Owens (D): 35
Dede Scozzafava (R): 30
Doug Hoffman (C): 23
Undecided: 12
(MoE: ±4%)
One more big news item out of NY-23 to add to the pile: Democrat Bill Owens is still holding down a decent-sized lead. Republican Dede Scozzafava is still in second place despite the general implosion of her campaign this week — note, though, that the sample was taken Monday through Wednesday, when things were only sort of going wrong and the dam hadn’t totally broken (with the Palin endorsement, the photo op snafu, the parking lot screaming, and… well, you know the rest of the story). In fact, these numbers match up very closely with the most recent Siena poll of the race from one week earlier, where Owens led at 33, with Scozzafava at 29 and Conservative Doug Hoffman at 23.
The poll also asks an interesting question of Hoffman voters: who’s your second choice? It looks like the Hoffman camp has done a sufficient job of poisoning Scozzafava’s well, for Scozzafava gets almost no second-choice votes: the answers were 62% undecided, 26% won’t vote, 9% Scozzafava, and 3% Owens. All three of the candidates have positive favorables, although Scozzafava has the narrowest spread (38/35, versus Owens’ 33/24 and Hoffman’s 27/19).
RaceTracker: NY-23
…have “reallocated” Hoffman voters to Owens and DeDe and called those numbers the “topline,” burying the honest topline trial heat result. I couldn’t help but think that as I read the poll. Yes, that’s how angry I am at Rasmussen for their bullshit this year.
I’m not surprised that 26% of Hoffman voters say they wouldn’t vote at all if in an Owens-DeDe two-way. Once you throw in a serious 3rd wheel into any election, you pick up voter participation from a few folks who wouldn’t show up otherwise. That’s true in NJ-Gov, too, with Daggett, but no one ever picks up on the reality that a nontrivial share of those Daggett voters can’t be reallocated because they just wouldn’t vote.
I’m actually quite shocked, though, that 62% of Hoffman voters say they’d be undecided between Owens and DeDe. It sounds like they perhaps really believe the canard that both are the same and both “liberals”–but yet they don’t put themselves in the “wouldn’t vote” category. I take that figure as an exmaple of voter ignorance about candidates in a special election.
I must say, Hoffman’s and his allies’ primary failure in this race that Owens will win is that they pigeonholed themselves too openly and explicitly as right-wingers. If you’re on TV bragging about being “conservative” and showing all the examples of it including being “pro-life” and whatever else, then you necessarily zero out your own appeal to the majority of voters who call themselves either liberal or moderate. I’m a Northern Virginia activist, and the McDonnell ads here never mention that he’s conservative or give any examples of his being conservative. If you woke up from a 20-year nap and learned about him only from his positive ads, you wouldn’t know he was a Republican or a conservative! And that’s how you win the middle. Hoffman and his people don’t seem to realize that they need more voters in the middle to actually win.
…that she can perhaps this pull this off. Being down 5 amid nothing but abysmal press isn’t too shabby at all.
I feel like Owens isn’t firing anyone up but rank-and-file Dems. Hoffman has sufficiently fired up his right-wing base, but it’s not a big-enough base to win solely off of. And, Scozzafava’s basically chipping off a handful of Dems and Indies and is probably on track to narrowly win over the majority of registered Republicans.
No one’s running away with this thing, that’s for sure.
is awesome. Seriously, they’re going to blow a historically GOP district just to prove a point? It amazes me how contradictory their logic is – on one hand conservative Republicans claim that if they are “conservative enough” in their ideology than they will win (cause, if you didn’t know, this is a “center-right nation”) but then they pull crap like this and blow elections for the Republicans. Meanwhile, they claim that Republicans who actually win in swing ditricts or states aren’t “real” conservatives. Yet they still cling (along with their guns and religion) to this notioon that America is a conservative nation and that an ideologically right-wing candidate will win anywhere!
This is an interesting lens into how the 2012 nomination may play out for the GOP. If national groups get this bent out of shape over an upstate New York congressional race, how will they react if anyone tries to stray fram far-right ideology in the Presidential battle?
Authoritarian Left-wing Democrats are even they are, a, a small minority of the liberal base, and b, even they wouldn’t demand a Pete Stark or Bernie Sanders in every 52% McCain district and would be perfectly fine with a moderate Democrat like Gabriella Gifford or Melissa Bean.
There is a real distinction here. The Republican bases collective heads blew up in anger at the nomination of a moderate for a moderate district, and tow they acted on that by sabotaging the party, something even most of the zealous authoritarian Democrats don’t want to do, preferring to work from within the party structure, and most obviously it is that these conservatives constitute a much larger portion of the electorate that the liberals. Political science professor was lamenting to me on the fact that nowhere else in the world is there this much furious and ignorant conservativism, of people criticizing Obama for negotiating with Iran, or the conservatives who demonize Jimmy Carter for sitting down with Hamas for discussions. Apparently doing anything other than unilaterally making demands as if you are absolutely right and have a universal moral platform and then killing whoever opposes you, is considered pansy weakness on their parts. In Europe you can’t even find Thatcherism anymore in the main parties, not even Merkel and Berlusconni would have no power if there were only a single large, stable, competent center-left party that could handle and control the vast multitude of radically liberal parties that constantly form their crumbling coalitions. In Europe you just can’t find this type of really hardcore anti-worker, Religious, pro-capitalist conservatism anymore, heck in many countries the center-right party would still by and large be a Democrat in America, the closest thing you get to such Republican parties are the fringe far-right Fascist parties.
is worse than Michael Jackson running in LA to defeat the Democratic incumbent.
More Grayson comments. He should probably chill now… But I do appreciate the hilarity and frank feelings on the suject.
From http://politicalticker.blogs.c…
He better be prepared for fund a lot of his campaign…